Free Homefront: The Voice of Freedom by John Milius and Raymond Benson Page B

will be gone in less than 24 hours
.
    And that’s just everything I found out on the first day
.
    On the second day, the 17th, I decided to take my chances and walk two miles down the hill toward Hollywood. I should have taken a weapon. I don’t own a weapon, but I should’ve taken
something
—a knife, baseball bat, a hammer. I got down to Franklin and saw throngs of angry people in the streets up ahead. Hollywood Boulevard was a madhouse. Looters were busy breaking in to shops and taking everything in sight. Liquor stores were hit the hardest. They tried to get into closed banks, but no one could get into the vaults
.
    Everywhere you looked, stalled or crashed automobiles sat blocking the roads. If you could imagine a giant kid playing with a bunch of toy cars and trucks, and then he dumped them all on the floor—that’s what it looked like
.
    Police rode horses and did their best to control the crowds. I got there in time to see them throwing tear gas canisters at the mob. Someone told me the crowd overpowered three policemen in downtown LA. The cops may have been beaten to death, I don’t know. I could only imagine what was going on in South Central and other poorer neighborhoods
.
    I hightailed it back to my house. I’d had enough adventure for one day. There was plenty of food in the pantry for, well, a little while. Maybe a week. I hope. Unfortunately, everything in my fridge is going to spoil. I went over to check on the Gomezes. Luisa told me Rudy is very depressed and won’t get out of bed. I asked her if they had enough to eat for a few days. She didn’t give me a straight answer, but it sounded as if they’d be okay. I could tell she was worried about her husband. The kids looked all right, just scared
.
    You know what? I’m scared, too
.
    That night, a policeman on horseback rode through the Hollywood Hills, shouting through one of those handheld loudspeakers. He told people to stay inside their homes. There was a curfew from 8:00 pm to 7:00 am. Looters would be shot on sight. Anyone caught on the streets after dark would suffer serious consequences. Questions asked later
.
    Apparently a lot of fires flared up around the city. As it’s winter and not the warmest time of the year, some people actually tried to build a fire in their house—with no fireplace—and ended up burning the place to the ground. In other cases, arson was the probable cause
.
    I couldn’t imagine what it was like in a cold city like Chicago or New York
.
    My God, is this Judgment Day? Is this what they were talking about when Revelations was written?
    The next day, the 18th, I walked in a different direction, toward a strip mall area I thought would be more civilized. The convenience store there was empty, completely looted. A gas station had been torched. People milled around with looks of despair on their faces. I saw grown men crying
.
    I recognized a cop I know, a guy I used for tips when I was Celebrity Trashing. His name is McDaniel. I don’t know his first name. Anyway, he recognized me, too, and we started talking. He gave me a leaflet from the mayor’s office. They’re circulating all over the city. That’s how I found out about the EMP. It said there was a nuclear explosion over the United States. Since no one can get any information from anybody, anywhere, it’s all speculation. But apparently some noted scientist-type issued a statement that the mayor adopted, so it was copied by hand on hundreds of these leaflets—and these are slowly spreading through LA with the help of the police
.
    The hard facts were laid out on the flyer: Our SCADA systems are dead. These are the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems. They control electrical transmission and distribution, water management, and oil and gas pipelines across the U.S. Additionally, the power grids all over the country are fried. When you think about how much of the minutiae in our daily lives depend on these things, you can see how we are up shit