Free Noise by Darin Bradley Page B

I can figure it out.”
    Bloody Mary
.
    “All right.” I managed a smile. “Until we get there, we’ll just call you ‘Four.’”
    She folded her arms. In the
cold
way, not the
fuck off
way.
    “It’s better. That we call you something else,” I said. “You need to leave what you see with a different name.”
    “Yeah, I get it.”
    “You’ll still follow orders.”
    “Yeah.”
    Orpheus couldn’t look back
.
    I turned, looked back out the front window. I was done talking to her reflection.
    “It says that a Place needs a name.”
    He couldn’t look back, or he’d lose her
.
    “It has a name.”
    She was quiet for a minute.
    In the underworld, nothing ever died. It couldn’t. Things lasted forever. Dark places sucked things in: medicines and sports cards from the grocery store, mud, the violence in the parking lot, and the dark outside the Zodiac Arms. The
what the fuck do we do next?
Dark places didn’t spit them back out. Nothing came backfrom Charybdis. The just-a-mouth monster at the bottom of the whirlpool. An ongoing event as being.
    Charybdis was a thing that carried meaning across miles and miles and miles. To the sailors in faraway places, through the waves that had the same potential, could be Charybdis anywhere. A Place anywhere.
    Our Place was 327 miles away.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    The ancients even had flowers that lived forever. In the underworld. They thought of everything.
    We had read another book.
Native Americans
, which I loved. The Zunis had the same, an immortal flower, continents away from the Greeks. The Zuni rain gods brought it back from the dark. From a different underworld. From different details.
    “What is it, Hiram?” she asked.
    I didn’t remember anything else about the Zunis. Which was fine. I had what I needed.
    “It’s Amaranth.”
    “Do you hear that?”
    “Where’s it coming from?”
    I listened. The sound carried easily up through the unfloored pier-and-beam.
    “It’s from school.”
    I got down on my knees, looked into the earthy dark, smelling dust.
    “It’s the bell tower. It uses speakers. Recordings. Fake bells.”
    I listened again. “Someone’s Placed the school.”
    “What?”
    Idiots.
    Four pointed over my head, out the window. “Look.”
    I got up and crept to the window. They were quieter than their own sounds. The sounds of engines and giant, humming tire treads on asphalt finally hit us. A pair of Humvees negotiated the automobile-bramble in the Sycamore intersection. One had a Browning .50-cal mounted on the top. A troop transport followed more sluggishly after.
    I felt cold.
    “Is that a Group?”
    “No. Yes.”
    Fuck.
    “It’s the National Guard.”
    “I thought—”
    “Yeah.”

THE BOOK:

    “TWO”

    SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “C,” PROCEDURE “I”

    (“THE FIRST PHASE”)

    (cont’d)

(v) They should take new names. (vi) They should carry upon them some Mark that identifies their alignment with the Party. (vii) Deliver this Mark in the presence of the rest of the Group, solemnly and with great respect. (viii) This cognitively ordains the Party to its task.

[4] (i) Further, Party Members (and Leaders specifically) should replace terms such as
murder, kill
, or
injure
with
neutralize, remove
, or
incapacitate
. (ii) The Leader should order early acts of violence, rather than leaving their analysis and execution to Party Members, which delivers the Leader from conscience-accountability with the knowledge that he or she did not personally harm a victim. (iii) The Party Member is delivered from such accountability with the knowledge that the voice of the Group directed his or her actions. (iv) The Group is everything. (v) The Party is simply an exploratory idea developing the Narrative. Party Members must be reminded of this often—they are not themselves when in Party.

[5] (i) Leaders and other Party Members must congratulate, thank, or otherwise affirm acts of violence committed by a Party Member in the interest of the