Helen Vasquez-Prada, who had long feared she would die by the sword, began to slip into madness, cursing the troops who had wiped out most of her family. “Bastards!” she wailed. “Son-of-a-bitch!” Her painful cries carried all the way upstairs, where even Aquino could hear them on the ground just outside the chapel. Japanese troops, no doubt tired of her howls, finally silenced her with a bayonet. “My mother lasted three agonizing days,” Fernando later said. “She screamed day and night from the pain of her wounds.”
