Homefront: The Voice of Freedom (2 page)

Kopple raised his QBZ-03 and fired bursts at the front line of infantry. It was a decent weapon, not great, although the damage it inflicted was slightly better than that of an M4.

“You’re wasting your ammo,” Lee said. “Wait until they get closer.”

Kopple released the trigger, coughed, and said, “I hate it when you’re right.”

Then he saw the civilians. A swarm of parents and children poured out from Rose Lane and into the line of fire.

“What the fuck?” Kopple stood and shouted, “Get out of here! Now!”

The people were already in panic mode, running in different directions. Savvy fathers spotted the oncoming juggernaut of troops and attempted to herd everyone back toward the school.

It was too late.

   Boone Karlson, the African American who brought the Montrose cell together, crouched behind the stone wall of an abandoned gas station, surveying the oncoming menace through binoculars. With the Koreans’ arrival to the town, he knew the ensuing weeks—maybe months—would end up being the most significant time of his life. Before the EMP, Karlson had often wondered if he would go through the stereotypical midlife crisis when he turned forty. Now, at thirty-nine, that wasn’t a concern. The crisis wasn’t personal—it was global.

The troops, swarming up the highway like ants, would be in range within a minute. As he waited, he glanced across the road to see if his men—and women—were ready.

A few more seconds and they would unleash hellfire …

He started to count down from five. When he got to three, the civilians showed up.

No!

Karlson stood to warn them, but he heard Kopple’s shout. Unfortunately, the alarm made the situation worse—the adults and children panicked and ran in a dozen directions.

The Koreans were in range. If the resistance cell was going to strike, they had to do it now.

Karlson shouted the order to fire at will
over the civilians’ heads
. The adults heard the order, grabbed
their children, and threw themselves onto the pavement. The few dozen resistance fighters reacted immediately. Gunfire erupted from their hidden positions, mowing down the Koreans in the front lines. Hopper Lee heard the enemy’s leader shouting commands to keep marching. The scene reminded Lee of old movies he’d seen of Revolutionary War-era battles with soldiers, carrying crude single-shot rifles with attached bayonets, simply marching straight at each other and shooting.

Then the tanks fired again. And again.

The shells struck a mass of the civilians, as well as obliterating a resistance bunker occupied by four men.

Screams of horror almost surpassed the din of gunfire.

Kopple cursed, stood, and fired the QBZ-03 at the oncoming soldiers. “Get off our property you sons of bitches!” he yelled, but a coughing spasm grabbed him like a vise. He fell to his knees and spat more dark phlegm over the sandbags in front of him. After he got his wind back, the sergeant just said, “Shit …”

More shells from the Korean tanks hit the street in front of the resistance fighters’ positions. When another cluster of civilians were killed in a blazing fireball, one surviving father had the tenacity to urge the rest to run back to the school. The dozens of parents and children who were still alive bolted across the road, directly into the streaking lines of fire.

Oh my God!
Karlson thought. He watched in repulsion as several adults and children were cut down; but the cluster kept running, and many of them made it to the cover of buildings along Rose Lane.

Lee’s walkie-talkie erupted in static and then Nguyen Huu Giap’s voice cut through the noise of
gunfire. “Hopper, be ready evacuate, yes? Plan we discuss. Route to Home through old cemetery and golf course. Over.”

Home was the Montrose cell’s hideout southeast of downtown, on the edge of the abandoned suburbs. With the addition of Giap’s cell, from Utah, the small den had become an overcrowded, yet cooperative community of like-minded individuals. There, they shared food and water and supplies, slept, trained, and made plans to attack the enemy. Like other cells around the country, they were the Koreans’ number-one target. Every day held the risk of being exposed. They were safe only as long as the enemy never discovered Home’s location.

Kopple picked up the radio. “This is Kopple, Chief. We read you. Just give us the word. What do you hear from our boy inside the station? Over.”

“I gave him five minutes. Over.”

“Better give him two. Out.”

Then the Korean infantry raised their own automatic weapons and sprayed the road and buildings in front of them. The barrage was a storm of deadly strength, forcing the small band of Americans to hunker down and take cover.

Goliath, unthinking and unfeeling, continued to defend the road by deflecting the Koreans’ gunfire and returning volleys of hell at the approaching fire ants.

   The old radio station building, not quite a hundred yards away from the melee, rattled with every detonation. The elements and tubes on the transistor board in front of Walker glowed bright and then faded. He pounded his fist on the counter. “Damn! Kelsie, I need more power.”

The woman leapt to the engine-generator, which
had begun to sputter. “We filled it with gas, it can’t be empty yet! Wait—I see, the voltage regulator is loose. Hold on.”

The gasoline used to fuel the generator was precious. Walker and Kelsie kept their own supply of the sequestered commodity at Home and used it only when Walker wanted to make a broadcast. Gas had been a luxury item that a minority of citizens could afford prior to the EMP attack. Now people murdered for it. Service stations that still carried and sold the valuable resource were few and far between, and they were protected with heavy security systems and often gun-wielding officers. However, bootlegging operations were widespread—supplies of petrol were smuggled over the borders of Canada and Mexico, which lay mostly out of the EMP’s range. The stuff sold on the black market for less than what one had to pay at the legitimate service stations, but it was still costly. In a different era it might well have been gold—or drugs.

The walkie-talkie blurted the new orders. “Walker! Two minutes! You copy, my friend? Over.”

The journalist grabbed the radio and answered. “All right!”

“We blow horn, yes? You move! Out!”

One of the guys in the cell had a bugle. Every day he blasted everything from
Reveille
to
Mess Call
to
Taps
. Giap was referring to the standard
Retreat
call. When Walker and Kelsie heard it, they had little choice but to run.

Wilcox fiddled with protuberances on the generator before sitting back on the floor and using her heel to lightly kick the unit—then the motor revved up and sounded healthy once again.

“There, try it now.”

Walker unfolded a scrap of paper upon which he
had scribbled, tapped the microphone again, and froze. He had rehearsed his speech a dozen times and suddenly he couldn’t open his mouth. It was too important to mess up.

“Ben?”

He didn’t move.

“Ben! Snap out of it!”

Walker waved her off. “I’m okay.”

Then he spoke into the mic.

JANUARY 14, 2025

Here we go again
.

As I start this year’s journal, I’m reminded of Frank, the head of the journalism department at USC. He was a mentor to me. Professor Shulman. Franklin Shulman. Frank. He was a great guy. I wonder where he is now?

Frank instilled in me the habit of keeping a journal. He said it works better if you do it in longhand, pen on paper, in a small notebook. I started doing it when I was a junior, in 2012. I was still keeping a journal when I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, in 2013. Ever since then, I’ve started a new one at the beginning of every year. So I have thirteen different little spiral notebooks on the shelf, each dated 2012, 2013, 2014 … and so on
.

As you can see by the date, I hadn’t yet started the journal for 2025. I don’t know why. Usually I’ve tried to pen the first entry on New Year’s Day. Maybe I was just abnormally lethargic this year
.

Never mind, here’s the first entry, halfway through the month. And I’ve got great news! I think I’m going to quit my job tomorrow! The economy is in the shit-hole, unemployment is 30-something %, I have no savings, no alternate plan … and I’m going to quit my job
.

And you know what? It’s going to feel damned good. I’m going to tell that asshole boss of mine where to stick it. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for months. No more interviewing idiots who are famous for being famous, no more hunting for scandals, no more unscrupulous yellow journalism
.

So what am I going to do instead?

I don’t know! Isn’t that great?

I can always try to be that serious investigative reporter I saw myself being when I got out of college. Or I can write that important American novel no one will read. Who knows? Maybe I’ll just sit on the sofa, watch TV, and drink my last bottle of Jack Daniels
.

Hey, sounds like a plan! For now, anyway
.

But first I have to go do one more bullshit job for
Celebrity Trash.
I’ve already committed to ride out to the LA Arena tonight to cover Saint Lorenzo’s “concert,” if you can call it that. What can I say? I keep my promises
.

Later, man
.

JANUARY 14, 2025

Ben Walker checked the fuel level on his vintage 1967 BSA Spitfire 650 and figured he had enough to get to the LA Arena and back. Ever since the price of gasoline skyrocketed about ten years earlier, travel by personal vehicle had become a luxury few people could afford. Gas stations—the small number across the country that stayed open—received a supply once a month and it was gone in a day. State governments had instituted different levels of strict rationing, forcing families to make do with buying gas every
two
months. People lined up for blocks, hoping to buy three or four gallons, just so they could get to work—if they had jobs. Public transportation facilities were given something of a break. City bus companies received a state-allotted amount, but a one-way ride on the damned things cost around $10. Walker hadn’t necessarily had the foresight of what was to come when he restored the motorcycle back when he was in college. It turned out to be one of the more fortuitous things he’d ever done. The Spitfire got fifty-sixty miles per gallon; with the bike’s four-gallon capacity, a tank could last him a month. As long as he used the bike only for work.

Work. What a joke.

Walker called himself a journalist, but he didn’t do
the kind of writing he had envisioned back at USC. As a twenty-one-year-old, cocky but naïve college graduate, he had visions of accepting a Pulitzer one day for investigative reporting. Instead, with the collapsed economy, the extinction of newspapers and magazines, and the dumbing-down of America, the only “news” people wanted to hear was not the typically bad truths coming out of Washington and the rest of the globe, but ridiculous celebrity and pop culture garbage that had no relevance in the real world. Hence, the only work Walker could find was penning junk for an online site called, appropriately,
Celebrity Trash
.

As he had just written in his journal that morning, Walker was committed to covering the LA Arena performance by the new ten-year-old evangelist sensation, Saint Lorenzo. Professing to be a faith healer, little Lorenzo had captured the public’s imagination because everyone just wanted something to believe in. Things had gotten so bad in America that a guy as crackpot as Saint Lorenzo was more newsworthy than anything the president of the United States had to say. While he was growing up, Walker had noticed how when things got really bad, nearly everyone became even more desperate in turning to religion as the answer to their problems. The government couldn’t save them from unemployment, shortage of food and water, and of course, lack of their beloved gasoline, so why not little Saint Lorenzo?

As Walker rode down from his home in the Hollywood Hills into the stinking metropolis, he reminded himself there was at least one good thing about the energy crisis—there were fewer cars on the road. And yet, all around him were more sobering reminders of America’s depressed condition. Strip malls had become parking lots for the homeless.
Movie theaters were empty and the studios couldn’t afford to make product. LA was no longer the entertainment capital of the world. The once elite Hollywood nightclubs had either closed or become even
more
choice locations for the very, very rich. Not that being wealthy did one much good these days. Anyone with serious money had become a pariah. The wealthy took their lives in their own hands if they ventured out in public. One of the few businesses that prospered in the last ten years was the security profession. The fancy homes in Beverly Hills had become fortresses. Bodyguards could easily find work. Too many fat cats had found themselves attacked and murdered on the streets for their Rolex watches or for what was in their wallets. Crime was at an all-time high.

Billboards along the Sunset Strip no longer advertised blockbuster movies or television shows; instead they were simply blank or covered with graffiti. The exception was a pristine display for controversial talk-show host and blogger, Horace Danziger. It was a gigantic photo of the celebrity, pointing a finger straight at the camera. A word bubble proclaimed: “Are you as pissed off as I am?” Danziger had become a media sensation by being one of the few outspoken critics of North Korea, as well as slamming the U.S. government for not doing anything about it. Nothing was sacred for Danziger—he attacked everyone. Walker both admired and was jealous of Danziger. That was the kind of journalism Walker wanted to do.

And then there was the Korean presence. Everywhere Walker looked, there were signs of Kim Jong-un’s superiority in the global markets. Where once upon a time it was Japan that had exported much of what America consumed, now it was Korea. Just about every electronic component these days
was made in Korea or its member states, the various countries that fell in line with the regime. American automobiles were a thing of the past. All new cars—for anyone foolish enough to buy one—came from the Far East, mostly Korea.