A security camera on a processing plant nearby captured what happened next. Mitsuyo could be seen calmly setting her bag on the ground and shouting to gain their attention. She advanced a few steps toward them and set herself with her right foot slightly forward, and her right hand gripping the handle of her sword, still in it’s sheath. As the first three Infected approached, jaws open and teeth bared, her right foot slid out and her blade flashed in a sweeping arc, decapitating the nearest one. She pirouetted and her blade slashed cleanly through the neck of the second one and then she thrust her sword up into the throat of the third in a move that was almost identical to the pose in the photo that was soon to become briefly famous.
The next Infected to reach her was much taller than she was, so she ducked and sliced through the tendons behind its knee. She spun around and beheaded it as it stumbled past her. After that she became almost a blur, spinning, sidestepping, slashing and thrusting until two dozen or more bodies lay around her and nothing else moved. She stepped back to survey the carnage, a look of quiet satisfaction on her face. She flicked her sword toward the ground and then grabbed it in a pinch of the cloth of her skirt. She slowly drew the blade through the cloth, cleaning it of impurities, and returned it to its sheath.
Moments later you could see people rushing in from the sides of the video, surrounding her. A huge dockworker picked her up and placed her on his shoulder, and many of the people in the crowd reached out just to touch her, their faces wreathed in smiles.
Two days later, the Imperial Palace posted a pair of pictures. In the first one Mitsuyo could be seen dressed in her school uniform, her sword at her side, walking alongside the Emperor in a beautiful garden. In the next, the Emperor is bowing to her and presenting her with a spectacular chrysanthemum. Her face is beaming with a brilliant smile, her crooked tooth forgotten.
South Elgin, Illinois
May 18th
The old man ripped open the box with the Amazon logo, pulled out the packing material and began lining up plastic jars on the kitchen table. There were a dozen each of Enrofloxacin, Amoxicillin, Metronidazole, Cephalexin and Ampicillin. He checked each item off the packing list, and set the empty shipping box on the floor. Some of them had pictures of happy dogs on their labels, which made sense since they were all veterinary antibiotics and antivirals. You couldn’t buy a 250-count jar of Amoxicillin for humans without a prescription, but you could buy them for dogs, and it was the same stuff. In fact, a lot of dog meds were first developed for humans and then found to be useful treating animals.
The next box contained anti-inflammatories, fungal creams, cortisone lotions and more. The box after contained other human over the counter medications, cough and cold stuff and painkillers, especially ibuprofen. He practically lived on ibuprofen.
The old man finished his unpacking and inventorying and then swept everything into the largest box and carried it downstairs. He set it down in front of some shelves and began to clear them off to make room. He grabbed another box and started dropping items in, and stopped. In his hand was a black and white photo of his parents on their wedding day. His dad, John, stood there, tall and handsome with a shock of unruly black hair, wearing a suit with wide lapels and a loud tie. His mom, Katie, stood next to him in a simple white dress, looking truly radiant. Mom was a beauty back then; people often compared her to a young Elizabeth Taylor.
Dad had grown up in a small town in Wisconsin. Dad’s father, a scrappy Welsh immigrant, carried the unfortunate name of Ulette Romeo Booth. His mother had supposedly picked the name Ulette out of a French novel she was reading when she gave birth. His friends called him Ham, or at least they did after he’d blackened an eye or two. He had worked most of his life as a janitor at the local high school. Grandpa Ulette met Grandma Nola there when she worked as a young cook’s assistant. She would go on to be head cook at the small school for thirty-five years. Decades later, when the old man would visit the town, he’d often meet senior citizens who remembered his grandma’s cooking fondly. “Your grandma sure could cook!” one old man told him. “I’d never admit it to my mother, but I ate better at school for lunch than I did at home for dinner.”
Grandpa was a jack of all trades who repaired shoes and harnesses on the side for extra money. When the time came, he and Grandma were able to send Dad to a two-year business school in Madison, the first Booth ever to have gone beyond high school. Grandpa also hunted and fished almost every day it was legal (and, the old man suspected, plenty of days when it wasn’t) and managed to put meat on the table throughout the Depression. He was an excellent shot; some said the best in Dodge County. He instilled his love of hunting in his son, who had passed it along to his two boys.
Mom and Dad made a handsome pair. He was much older than she was, by eleven years. He had enlisted right after Pearl Harbor, and fought across Europe with the Fifth Infantry Division. He’d been awarded a Bronze Star for Valor during the Battle of the Bulge, and had finally mustered out in ‘46. He got a job with International Harvester in downtown Chicago when he came home, and there he met Mom, Katarina Thoreson, the child of immigrants from Norway. She was a stunning young woman with a lively sense of humor and he was instantly attracted to her. She liked him too, this big quiet guy who always seemed to find a reason to hang around near her desk. But as Mom liked to say, during those years when he should have been learning how to flirt with women, he was crawling around in the mud in Europe.
The old man figured he and Evan might never have been born if his Dad hadn’t one day mentioned to one of the secretaries that his birthday was the coming Saturday. She told him that Katie Thoreson upstairs had the same birthday, and wasn’t that a coincidence! He marched right upstairs and asked her out to dinner, and they were married five months later.
The old man was born two years after that. Two years later, they had his brother Evan, and three years after that, his sister, Elizabeth. A shadow crossed his face as he thought of her, so pretty and small. She had tight black curls and a Cupid’s bow mouth. With the name Elizabeth Booth, she soon became “Betty Boop” to everyone, and it fit her. She was brave and adventurous and silly, and always had a smile for her big brothers, whom she adored. The feeling was very mutual. They treated her like a mascot, took her with them on their adventures to the Creek and the Woods, let her help them build their forts, and join them as they fished and spied on the local wildlife.
One day when he was twelve and Betty Boop was seven, they were all riding their bikes together, with his sister trailing a few yards behind, when they passed through an intersection. The car that hit her failed to stop at the stop sign. Instead it cruised through the intersection without even braking, rolled over her, and sped away. When he reached her side, she lay twisted and broken, her collarbone splintered and jutting out through a bloody hole, and blood seeped out of the back of the skull where her head had smashed into the pavement. He ran to her and took her face in his hands and said, “I love you, Betty Boop,” while the tears sluiced down his cheeks. She had tried to smile and then the light had gone out of her eyes.
Someone called his parents. Their car screeched to a stop and they ran to his sister’s body. His mother sunk to her knees and wailed in grief and shock. His father, his face red with rage, looked over to where Owen stood with his younger brother and shouted, “God damn it, Owen, you were supposed to look out for your sister!”
He went back to the scene two days after the accident and watched how soon before the stop sign people braked, and measured how long it took him to stop his bike, and he knew. Over the next week, family and friends gathered around his parents in their grief. No one came right out and said anything to him: they all spoke kindly to him about his “tragic loss,” but he could tell they knew. He could see it in their eyes and hear it in his mother’s sobs and his father’s heavy sighs.
He killed her.
It was his fault. If he had just looked, if he hadn’t been such a stupid, d
umbass piece of shit idiot, if he had just checked to see if the there was someone coming who wasn’t putting on their brakes, he could have stopped the three of them and the guy who ran the stop sign wouldn’t have hit anyone and his sister would still be alive and it was all his fault.
Every moment he spent with his parents after that, all through the awful wake and the terrible, terrifying funeral, he wondered if they were thinking about it at that moment, how he let them down, how it was his fault his little sister lay in that awful box. When his father talked quietly to his mother, when she cried and he held her, he wondered if they would send him away somewhere for what he’d done, or if they would just throw him out the door and tell him he wasn’t part of the family anymore.
When no one said anything he began to realize that they were too nice, too good to cast him away. They would raise him, feed him, clothe him, pretend he was still their son. His mother would still hug him and tell him she loved him, his father would still ruffle his hair and call him “Buddy,” but it was now all a sham. He killed his sister. There was no coming back from that.
The cops caught the guy, some neighbor’s uncle from the South Side of Chicago, a habitual drinker. He must have been politically connected, because somehow the charges went from drunk driving and vehicular homicide to leaving the scene of an accident. The bastard actually smirked as he left the courtroom with a fine and a suspended sentence.
Four months later someone shot him to death leaving a bar. There were no witnesses. Dad was questioned, but three buddies in Wisconsin swore he was hunting with them all that weekend and one of them was a Catholic priest, so no charges were filed. Nobody told the cops that Father Derrick had been a close friend of Dad’s since they were toddlers.
Owen changed after his sister’s death. He’d been an outgoing, sociable kid before the accident. He withdrew into himself and spent a lot of time by himself in the forests and fields near their house. He also ran and lifted weights almost obsessively, and hunted and fished every chance he could, always alone. The depressions started, the bleak moods of self-loathing and anger. He tried to tell his mother about it but she heard him out for a few moments and cried, “Oh no, don’t talk like that! It makes me think we should put you in an institution somewhere!”
So he learned. Nobody gave a shit when you felt bad. Instead they wanted to send you away. Hide it. Force yourself to function. When he was in the blackest depths, when he felt like a turd in the world’s punch bowl, he would ask himself, what would a normal person do in this situation? And then he tried to do that. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
When high school rolled around he signed up for football. He played free safety, mostly, and by his sophomore year he earned a starting position on the varsity team, where he gained a reputation for his intimidating style of play.
In the second game of his junior year, they were up against their conference arch rival and he was covering one of their wide receivers. The quarterback heaved a high pass their way. Instead of rushing in to break up the pass, he held back a step and timed it so he hit the other kid just as he leapt high into the air, totally exposed, his arms above his head. As the pass hit his hands, Booth delivered a violent blow to his rib cage so hard that people in the stands actually heard two of his ribs break.
A local sports reporter along the sideline heard his coach say, “Man! That kid has the heart of an assassin!” and after that all the papers referred to him as Owen “The Assassin” Booth. He ended up his senior year on the Chicago Tribune’s All State Defensive Team. He made straight A’s and earned some of the best ACT and SAT scores in his class, so the scholarship offers came pouring in.
Everyone, especially his parents, was stunned when he joined the Marines instead.
Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam
March 30th, 1972
He spent his first two tours in Vietnam with the Second of the Fourth, Chesty Puller’s old outfit, as a private and then a corporal. At the end of his second tour he had a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star of his own, and got promoted to E-5 and sent to sergeants’ school in Hawaii, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as it sounded. As a newly minted Marine Sergeant he hoped to get back in-country, but with the draw-down it looked like he might end his enlistment stateside. It was early 1972 by then, and America’s troop commitment in Vietnam was down to about 60,000 total personnel, down from a peak of over half a million four years earlier.
It looked like the war was winding down. Then on Easter morning, March 30th of 1972, 120,000 North Vietnamese Regular Army troops, backed by 250 Soviet-made tanks and thousands of artillery tubes, came pouring across the DMZ and the Laotian border, crumpling the hapless South Vietnamese Army as they came.
The 2/4 joined with elements of the 3rd to make up a rapid reaction Special Landing Force. On April 22nd, North Vietnamese infantry and armor units were driving toward the city of Quang Tri, which would give them control of the whole province and the coastal highway. The battle had seesawed back and forth for weeks. The key was a bridge over the deep and fast-moving Bao Mai river, the sole approach from the west, and the NVA had managed to force a salient across the only bridge. The ARVN attempted to seal off the incursion, but their troops were worn down and beginning to buckle. Booth was part of a six hundred-man Marine blocking force that was sent in to hold the position and deny the NVA.
Fighting was fierce. The NVA pounded the Marine positions with heavy artillery and repeated attacks. Booth’s platoon got hit especially hard that by late afternoon they were down to about 60 percent effectives. Booth himself took a wound when an enemy round dug a shallow furrow across his right bicep. It felt like he’d been whacked with a red-hot poker. During a brief lull, the lieutenant ordered him back to the aid station in the rear to get his arm looked at. He grabbed his pack and took off at a fast trot.
The aid station was set up behind a small tree-covered hill on a south facing slope, well away from the fighting to the north… or so they thought. However, under heavy cloud cover that prevented aerial recognizance, Charlie had managed to bring up bridging equipment a couple klicks to the south in an effort to envelope their position from behind. The aid station stood right in the way.
Already it was taking heavy fire. The LZ was so hot that the evac choppers couldn’t land. One brave pilot managed to set down, and corpsmen hurriedly shoved wounded in the door and strapped them to the landing skids, while AK47 rounds pinged off the ship and mortar shells crashed around them. Others were packing up gear and obviously preparing to bug out. Someone yelled, “Leave it! Leave it! Get on the chopper!” Booth ran down the hill to a Marine captain sitting in the doorway of the chopper, with fresh bandages on a bloody shoulder and his leg in a splint.
“Sir!” he shouted over the incoming fire and the roar of the chopper’s engine. “What’s happening?”
“Charlie’s hitting us in force. This place is too hot. All personnel have been ordered to leave, ASAP. Turn around and didi mau, Sergeant!”
Booth looked around him. There were still at least a dozen seriously wounded men on the ground, both Marines and ARVN. “Sir, what about them? We can’t just leave ‘em! You know what Charlie will do to ‘em!” Both the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were infamous for barbarities committed against captured troops from both armies, especially the wounded.
The captain looked pained. “Sergeant, we’ve been ordered to evac. It can’t be helped. Now run up the hill and make yourself scarce!”
Booth looked around again at the men on the ground. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that. Some of these men are my people. I’m not leaving.”
The captain grabbed his arm and looked him in the eye. “What’s your name, Marine?”
“Booth, sir. Owen W.”
“Booth, you know you’re disobeying a direct order?”
He nodded. “I do, sir.” He spotted a radio on the ground. “See if you can get me fire support, s
ir. I’ll hold ‘em until relief arrives. I’m going to burrow in like a badger and make ‘em dig me out.”
“You going to operate the radio with one hand and your weapon with the other? That’s not going to work, Sergeant.”
“I expect that’s why the government issued me this fine sidearm, sir. You have any extra .45?”
The captain reached into a pocket and handed him two full magazines, and then ejected the one from his sidearm for Booth to catch. “Good luck, Marine!” he said, and the chopper rocketed into the air.
He did a quick check of the packs nearby and came up with half a dozen magazines of 5.56, and a few more .45. He figured he needed to set up a defensive position far enough away from the wounded that they wouldn’t get hit by incoming, but close enough to defend them. About fifty yards away along the face of the hill, he spotted a cluster of boulders sticking out of the short grass. He grabbed the radio and ran to them, keeping his head low as rounds chewed up the hillside around him. He could see the enemy about half a klick on the other side of a small creek, at least a hundred of them in the first wave, and hundreds more behind them. They were too far away for effective fire, yet.
He set the radio down behind one of the boulders, threw his backpack on the ground, grabbed his trenching tool and started to dig. The ground, still damp from the monsoons, came up easily and in minutes he had a decent firing position, a two-foot mound of dirt that stretched from boulder to boulder, a distance of about six feet. He dug a hole about a foot deep and set the radio in it, its antenna wobbling in the air.
He pulled a map out of an outside pocket of his pack and laid it out on the ground in front of him, fired up the radio and reached out for the fire base. “Bravo Mike Four, Bravo Mike Four, this is Marine Sergeant Owen Booth, do you read me?”
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 17
