Cujo (38 page)

•  •  •

Donna Trenton was sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel of the Pinto. Tad had finally fallen asleep again, but his sleep was not restful; he twisted, turned, sometimes moaned. She was afraid he was reliving in his dreams what had happened earlier.

She felt his forehead; he muttered something and pulled away from her touch. His eyelids fluttered and then slipped closed again. He felt feverish—almost surely a result of the constant tension and fear. She felt feverish herself, and she was in severe pain. Her belly hurt, but those wounds were superficial, little more than scratches. She had been lucky there. Cujo had damaged her left leg more. The wounds there (the
bites,
her mind insisted, as if relishing the horror of it) were deep and ugly. They had bled a lot before clotting, and she hadn't tried to apply a bandage right away, although there was a first-aid kit in the Pinto's glovebox. Vaguely she supposed she had hoped that the flowing blood would wash the wound clean . . . did that really happen, or was it just an old wives' tale? She didn't know. There was so much she didn't know, so goddam much.

By the time the lacerated punctures had finally clotted, her thigh and the driver's bucket seat were both tacky with her blood. She needed three gauze pads from the first-aid kit to cover the wound. They were the last three in the kit.
Have to replace those,
she thought, and that brought on a short hysterical fit of the giggles.

In the faint light, the flesh just above her knee had looked like dark plowed earth. There was a steady throbbing ache there that had not changed since the dog bit her. She had dry-swallowed a couple of aspirin from the kit, but they didn't make a dent in the pain. Her head ached badly too, as if a bundle of wires were slowly being twisted tighter and tighter inside each temple.

Flexing the leg brought the quality of the pain up from the throbbing ache to a sharp, glassy beat. She had no idea if she
could even walk on the leg now, let alone run for the porch door. And did it really matter? The dog was sitting on the gravel between her car door and the door which gave on the porch, its hideously mangled head drooping . . . but with its eyes fixed unfailingly on the car. On
her.

Somehow she didn't think Cujo was going to move again, at least not tonight. Tomorrow the sun might drive him into the barn, if it was as hot as it had been yesterday.

“It wants me,” she whispered through her blistered lips. It was true. For reasons decreed by Fate, or for its own unknowable ones, the dog wanted her.

When it had fallen on the gravel, she had been sure it was dying. No living thing could have taken the pounding she had given it with the door. Even its thick fur hadn't been able to cushion the blows. One of the Saint Bernard's ears appeared to be dangling by no more than a string of flesh.

But it had regained its feet, little by little. She hadn't been able to believe her eyes . . . hadn't
wanted
to believe her eyes.

“No!”
she had shrieked, totally out of control.
“No, lie down, you're supposed to be dead, lie down, lie down and die, you shit dog!”

“Mommy, don't,” Tad had murmured, holding his head. “It hurts . . . it hurts me . . .”

Since then, nothing in the situation had changed. Time had resumed its former slow crawl. She had put her watch to her ear several times to make sure it was still ticking, because the hands never seemed to change position.

Twenty past twelve.

What do we know about rabies, class?

Precious little. Some hazy fragments that had probably come from Sunday-supplement articles. A pamphlet leafed through idly back in New York when she had taken the family cat, Dinah, for her distemper shot at the vet's. Excuse me, distemper and
rabies
shots.

Rabies, a disease of the central nervous system, the good old CNS. Causes slow destruction of same—but how? She was blank on that, and probably the doctors were, too. Otherwise the disease wouldn't be considered so damned dangerous. Of course, she thought hopefully, I don't even know for sure that the dog
is
rabid. The only rabid dog I've ever seen was the one Gregory Peck shot with a rifle in
To Kill a
Mockingbird.
Except of course that dog wasn't
really
rabid, it was just pretend, it was probably some mangy mutt they'd gotten from the local pound and they put Gillette Foamy all over him. . . .

She pulled her mind back to the point. Better to make what Vic called a worst-case analysis, at least for now. Besides, in her heart she was sure the dog was rabid—what else would make it behave as it had? The dog was as mad as a hatter.

And it had bitten her. Badly. What did that mean?

People could get rabies, she knew, and it was a horrible way to die. Maybe the worst. There was a vaccine for it, and a series of injections was the prescribed method of treatment. The injections were quite painful, although probably not as painful as going the way the dog out there was going. But . . .

She seemed to remember reading that there were only two instances where people had lived through an advanced case of rabies—a case, that is, that had not been diagnosed until the carriers had begun exhibiting symptoms. One of the survivors was a boy who had recovered entirely. The other had been an animal researcher who had suffered permanent brain damage. The good old CNS had just fallen apart.

The longer the disease went untreated, the less chance there was. She rubbed her forehead and her hands skidded across a film of cold sweat.

How long was too long? Hours? Days? Weeks? A month, maybe? She didn't know.

Suddenly the car seemed to be shrinking. It was the size of a Honda, then the size of one of those strange little three-wheelers they used to give disabled people in England, then the size of an enclosed motorcycle sidecar, finally the size of a coffin. A double coffin for her and Tad. They had to get out, get out, get
out
—

Her hand was fumbling for the doorhandle before she got hold of herself again. Her heart was racing, accelerating the thudding in her head.
Please,
she thought.
It's bad enough without claustrophobia, so please . . . please . . . please.

Her thirst was back again, raging.

She looked out and Cujo stared implacably back at her, his body seemingly split in two by the silver crack running through the window.

Help us, someone,
she thought.
Please, please, help us.

•  •  •

Roscoe Fisher was parked back in the shadows of Jerry's Citgo when the call came in. He was ostensibly watching for speeders, but in actual fact he was cooping. At twelve thirty on a Wednesday morning, Route 117 was totally dead. He had a little alarm clock inside his skull, and he trusted it to wake him up around one, when the Norway Drive-In let out. Then there might be some action.

“Unit three, come in, unit three. Over.”

Roscoe snapped awake, spilling cold coffee in a Styrofoam cup down into his crotch.

“Oh
shitfire,
” Roscoe said dolefully. “Now that's nice, isn't it? Kee-rist!”

“Unit three, you copy? Over?”

He grabbed the mike and pushed the button on the side. “I copy, base.” He would have liked to have added that he hoped it was good because he was sitting with his balls in a puddle of cold coffee, but you never knew who was monitoring police calls on his or her trusty Bearcat scanner . . . even at twelve thirty in the morning.

“Want you to take a run up to Eighty-three Larch Street,” Billy said. “Residence of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Trenton. Check the place out. Over.”

“What am I checking for, base? Over.”

“Trenton's in Boston and no one's answering his calls. He thinks someone should be home. Over.”

Well, that's wonderful, isn't it? Roscoe Fisher thought sourly. For this I got a four-buck cleaning bill, and if I do have to stop a speeder, the guy's going to think I got so excited at the prospect of a collar that I pissed myself.

“Ten-four and time out,” Roscoe said, starting his cruiser. “Over.”

“I make it twelve thirty-four
A.M.
,” Billy said. “There's a key hanging on a nail under the front porch eave, unit three. Mr. Trenton would like you to go right on inside and look around if the premises appear deserted. Over.”

“Roger, base. Over and out.”

“Out.”

Roscoe popped on his headlights and cruised down Castle Rock's deserted Main Street, past the Common and the bandstand with its conical green roof. He went up the hill and turned right on Larch Street near the top. The Trentons' was the second house from the corner, and he saw that in the
daytime they would have a nice view of the town below. He pulled the Sheriff's Department Fury III up to the curb and got out, closing the door quietly. The street was dark, fast asleep.

He paused for a moment, pulling the wet cloth of his uniform trousers away from his crotch (grimacing as he did it), and then went up the driveway. The driveway was empty, and so was the small one-car garage at the end of it. He saw a Big Wheels trike parked inside. It was just like the one his own son had.

He closed the garage door and went around to the front porch. He saw that this week's copy of the
Call
was leaning against the porch door. Roscoe picked it up and tried the door. It was unlocked. He went onto the porch, feeling like an intruder. He tossed the paper on the porch glider and pushed the bell beside the inner door. Chimes went off in the house, but no one came. He rang twice more over a space of about three minutes, allowing for the time it would take the lady to wake up, put on a robe, and come downstairs . . . if the lady was there.

When there was still no answer, he tried the door. It was locked.

Husband's away and she's probably staying over with friends,
he thought—but the fact that she hadn't notified her husband also struck Roscoe Fisher as mildly strange.

He felt under the peaked eave, and his fingers knocked off the key Vic had hung up there not long after the Trentons had moved in. He took it down and unlocked the front door—if he had tried the kitchen door as Steve Kemp had that afternoon, he could have walked right in. Like most people in Castle Rock, Donna was slipshod about buttoning up when she went out.

Roscoe went in. He had his flashlight, but he preferred not to use it. That would have made him feel even more like an unlawful intruder—a burglar with a large coffee stain on his crotch. He felt for a switchplate and eventually found one with two switches. The top one turned on the porch light, and he turned that one off quickly. The bottom one turned on the living-room light.

He looked around for a long moment, doubting what he was seeing—at first he thought it must be some trick of his
eyes, that they had not adjusted to the light or something. But nothing changed, and his heart began to pump quickly.

Mustn't touch anything,
he thought.
Can't balls this up.
He had forgotten about the wet coffee splotch on his pants, and he had forgotten about feeling like an intruder. He was scared and excited.

Something had happened here, all right. The living room had been turned topsy-turvy. There was shattered glass from a knickknack shelf all over the floor. The furniture had been overturned, the books had been scattered every whichway. The big mirror over the fireplace was also broken—
seven years' bad luck for somebody,
Roscoe thought, and found himself thinking suddenly and for no reason about Frank Dodd, with whom he had often shared a cruiser. Frank Dodd, the friendly small-town cop who had just happened to also be a psycho who murdered women and little children. Roscoe's arms broke out in a gooseflesh suddenly. This was no place to be thinking about Frank.

He went into the kitchen through the dining room, where everything had been swept off the table—he skirted that mess carefully. The kitchen was worse. He felt a fresh chill creep down his spine. Someone had gone absolutely crazy in here. The doors to the bar cabinet stood open, and someone had used the length of the kitchen like a Pitch-Til-U-Win alley at a county fair. Pots were everywhere, and white stuff that looked like snow but had to be soap powder.

Written on the message board in large and hurried block letters was this:

I left something upstairs for you, baby.

Suddenly Roscoe Fisher didn't want to go upstairs. More than anything else, he didn't want to go up there. He had helped clean up three of the messes Frank Dodd had left behind him, including the body of Mary Kate Hendrasen, who had been raped and murdered on the Castle Rock bandstand in the Common. He never wanted to see anything like that again . . . and suppose the woman was up there, shot or slashed or strangled? Roscoe had seen plenty of mayhem on the roads and had even got used to it, after a fashion. Two summers ago he and Billy and Sheriff Bannerman had pulled a man out of a potato-grading machine in pieces, and
that
had been one to tell your grandchildren about. But he had not seen a homicide since the Hendrasen girl, and he did not want to see one now.

He didn't know whether to be relieved or disgusted by what he found on the Trentons' bedspread.

He went back to his car and called in.

•  •  •

When the telephone rang, Vic and Roger were both up, sitting in front of the TV, not talking much, smoking their heads off.
Frankenstein,
the original film, was on. It was twenty minutes after one.

Vic grabbed the phone before it had completed its first ring. “Hello? Donna? Is that—”

“Is this Mr. Trenton?” A man's voice.

“Yes?”

“This is Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Trenton. I'm afraid I have some rather upsetting information for you. I'm sor—”