by David Kubicek
WARNING: If you are at all squeamish about blood and gore, you might not want to read further. If, however, you are a regular reader/writer of horror stories or a watcher of horror movies, it’s probably all right for you to continue.
My brother John and I have had many strange conversations over the years and gotten involved in many off-beat projects. Two that come to mind are when we played rock music backwards to look for satanic messages and when we took a fake UFO photo.
One time, many years ago, we got onto the subject of King Kong’s epic fall from the Empire State Building. How we got onto the subject, I don’t remember.
To recap the climactic scene, the giant ape–clutching Fay Wray–climbs to the top of the Empire State Building. He sets Fay down so he can swat more effectively at the military planes that are buzzing around his head, and he falls to his death.
John said that a mass the size of that ape falling that distance would hit the pavement so hard that it would burst like a rotten tomato and create a far-reaching splatter pattern. It would be similar to the blood splatter detectives examine when someone has been brutally and bloodily murdered.
Most of the gore would be around the body with splashes on the walls and ceiling growing smaller and less dense with their distance from the unfortunate corpse. John maintained that a similar splatter pattern would result when the sorrowful simian smashed into the pavement. In fact, John calculated the radius of the splatter pattern.
Although John was highly proficient in math, this equation would have been fairly simple as equations go. The only unknown was how much the ape weighed. I don’t remember if the figure was available in any of the King Kong literature or if John made an estimate for the sake of filling in the blanks. The other factors-like-how high the building was and the velocity at which the ape plummeted to the pavement–could be looked up or determined by other calculations.
According to John’s calculations, the splatter pattern was sizeable. He found that simian debris would be flung as far away as Albany, which was approximately 150 miles distant. These, of course, would be smaller bits, like in the splatter pattern of our murder victim. Albany might see some molecules of ape innards or blood mist settle down from the sky but not big pieces like chunks of intestines or pieces of liver.
This, of course, would be the best-case scenario if the land were flat with no obstructions. Unfortunately, with city skyscrapers surrounding the impact zone most of the splatter would be blocked by the buildings–there would be ape innards many stories up on those buildings, in fact.
But maybe a little blood mist would clear the tops of those buildings and make its way to Albany.
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Amerika was set 10 years after the Soviet Union had taken over the U.S., and as you can imagine, nothing good came from that. The local casting director put out a call for lots of extras to play the downtrodden citizens. I was an independent writing contractor at the time, and although this was not a writing job, I would be paid a whopping $40 per day, and it would be a good experience I could use in my fiction. Besides, it would be seriously cool.