"Kit Reed - Song of the Black Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

waste excavating cadavers and no way of knowing who to rescue first. Only the black dog knows which
of the victims is poised at the door to death, and only he can guide us in to pull that victim back from the
brink."

Reporters on either side exchange skeptical looks, but Bill is beyond questions. He does not so much
ignore his colleagues as rise above them like a soul cut loose and floating outside himself, observing from
the top left-hand corner of the press booth. Did he see the dog's eyes back then or did he only imagine
it?

Does it see him?

Do I?

He whirls. Dear God!

"Don't you see?" the officer trills, rolling into the finale. "Now we know who to rescue first!"

All over the auditorium, hands fly up: questions.

"Of course you want to know how we discovered his power. Science is an exact discipline, but to tell the
truth, it was an accident."

Bill leans forward as she describes a routine training exercise, the black dog going through its paces like
all the others until, without prompting, it stops cold. Sits down in front of the trainer. Refuses to budge. In
spite of threats it sits like a rock until its original trainer—young man, too young to have a heart
condition—clutches his throat and drops like a felled redwood. Infarction, the coroner says. It's nothing,
the chief says. It's just coincidence.

"But I," the speaker says, "as an expert, I knew we were onto something big." She whispers into the
microphone, "I took him home."

There the ambitious forensics officer devised a series of tests for the black dog …

Matter-of-factly, she details visits to hospitals and hospices, in which the dog paces the complex of halls
like a moving shadow and then. Sits. Is present at the exact moment when the soul leaves the body. He is
unfailing in his accuracy. The black dog is right every single time. Trainer and dog move on to wards
where patients are more viable. Some will make it. Some may not. The dog sits down. Doctors send in
the crash cart and save the patient. See how valuable this is?

Bill tunes out of her recital. What it took to get the commissioners' approval. Startup money. Training and
experiments. The first disaster—factory explosion—in which medics follow the black dog into the ruins
and make sensational, last-minute rescues. The building collapse in which at least a dozen are yanked
back from the brink of death. Certain fires. The list goes on, but by this time Bill Siefert is thinking of one
thing and one thing only.

He has to see the dog.
"In emergency situations like these," she says, "prioritization is imperative. Why rush to help people strong
enough to make it until we get around to them when there are cases in which immediate rescue means the
difference between life and death? Why lose hours excavating victims who are already corpses?"