John Blank Must Die

KILL
“I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.” -Arlo Guthrie, from Alice’s Restaurant

Decision made in the “To Kill or Not To Kill” zone. It was “To Kill”.

This was actually not an easy decision. To be honest, from the start we wanted to write the blood. We wanted to write the scene… to show the blood, in words.

But we felt challenged. The circumstances… an accidental confrontation in a bathroom in an extremely public museum. This isn’t your “stop and have a bath” kind of a situation… uh-uh, not time to dilly-dally, not time to really enjoy the moment.

And our Luca, Soup Pot Killer extraordinaire, has also been an enforcer and assassin in his life. He knows and understands these kinds of situations. It would be swift and clean, even with a knife.

But we wanted abject horror. We wanted to skew the circumstances. It seemed that if we were going to go through with the kill, it would have to be big, unexpected, and horrific. And, most importantly, (at least to me) believable.

So we thought about it. If you were skilled and drove a small thin long blade under the sternum, upwards and a bit to the left, you could substantially pierce the right and even left ventricles of the heart, causing nearly instantaneous death from massive internal blood loss. Remember, we said “if you were skilled.”

So we thought about that kind of kill. We thought about our strong-skilled Luca and decided that he would kill the guard that way. Then we thought about what might go wrong. I touched my sternum and got out my human anatomy books. I read and researched.

In my journey I found out that the Xiphoid Process is usually fused to the body of the sternum in the human adult by age 29 and that it can be naturally bifurcated, sometimes perforated. It occurred to me that these non-threatening morphological differences could catch the tip of a sharp blade and drastically change the circumstances of the situation.

A much bigger hole and a lot more blood. More drama.

So, what do you think about the solution? Did we meet our burden? Please leave us a comment… we would really love to hear from you!