Free Cujo by Stephen King

Now her hands and feet and cheeks felt numb and cold, as if she had been out with Joe on the snowmobile for too long. But tomorrow was the first of July; the snowmobile was put neatly away in the back shed with its tarp snugged down.
    It can’t be. There’s been some mistake.
    But there was no mistake. She had checked half a dozen times, and there was no mistake.
    After all, it has to happen to somebody, doesn’t it?
    Yes, of course. To somebody. But to her?
    She could hear Joe pounding on something in his garage, a high, belling sound that beat its way into the hot afternoon like a hammer shaping thin metal. There was a pause, and then, faintly: “Shit!”
    The hammer struck once more and there was a longer pause. Then her husband hollered: “Brett!”
    She always cringed a little when he raised his voice that way and yelled for their boy. Brett loved his father very much, but Charity had never been sure just how Joe felt about his son. That was a dreadful thing to be thinking, but it was true. Once, about two years ago, she had had a horrible nightmare, one she didn’t think she would ever forget. She dreamed that her husband drove a pitchfork directly into Brett’s chest. The tines went right through him and poked out the back of Brett’s T-shirt, holding it out the way tent poles hold a tent up in the air. Little sucker didn’t come when I hollered him down, her dream husband said, and she had awakened with a jerk beside her real husband, who had been sleeping the sleep of beer beside her in his boxer shorts. The moonlight had been falling through the window and onto the bed where she now sat, moonlight in a cold and uncaring flood of light, and she had understood just how afraid a person could be, how fear was a monster with yellow teeth, set afoot by an angry God to eat the unwary and the unfit. Joe had used his hands on her a few times in the course of their marriage, and she had learned. She wasn’t a genius, maybe, but her mother hadn’t raised any fools. Now she did what Joe told her and rarely argued. She guessed Brett was that way too. But she feared for the boy sometimes.
    She went to the window in time to see Brett run across the yard and into the barn. Cujo trailed at Brett’s heels, looking hot and dispirited.
    Faintly: “Hold this for me, Brett.”
    More faintly: “Sure, Daddy.”
    The hammering started again, that merciless icepick sound: Whing! Whing! Whing! She imagined Brett holding something against something—a coldchisel against a frozen bearing, maybe, or a square spike against a lockbolt. Herhusband, a Pall Mall jittering in the corner of his thin mouth, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up, swinging a five-pound pony-hammer. And if he was drunk . . . if his aim was a little off . . .
    In her mind she could hear Brett’s agonized howl as the hammer mashed his hand to a red, splintered pulp, and she crossed her arms over her bosom against the vision.
    She looked at the thing in her hand again and wondered if there was a way she could use it. More than anything in the world, she wanted to go to Connecticut to see her sister Holly. It had been six years now, in the summer of 1974—she remembered well enough, because it had been a bad summer for her except for that one pleasant weekend. ’Seventy-four had been the year Brett’s night problems had begun—restlessness, bad dreams, and, more and more frequently, incidents of sleepwalking. It was also the year Joe began drinking heavily. Brett’s uneasy nights and his somnambulism had eventually gone away. Joe’s drinking had not.
    Brett had been four then; he was ten now and didn’t even remember his Aunt Holly, who had been married for six years. She had a little boy, named after her husband, and a little girl. Charity had never seen either child, her own niece and nephew, except for the Kodachromes Holly occasionally sent in the mail.
    She had