Green Limbo

By Lincoln Reed

Your murderer wears a green coat.

High collar, turned up. His unwavering eyes lock with yours from across the bar as he discreetly pays the door fee and enters like a kryptonite bullet nobody notices but you. His shadowy fedora is olive-tinted, matching every lime-tinsel and kelly-painted shade in this sweaty watering hole. His fake mustache is twirled like a charmeuse cliché, one that implies a smirk of deadly confidence.

It’s evening, Saint Patrick’s Day, and your place of death is a downtown Indianapolis bar. Tonight, it’s full of bodies packed wall to wall—girls and guys holding glasses of cheap beer that scent the muggy air with an aroma of bad decisions and forgotten cares. You’re too drunk to drive away now. But you’re not alone in this quandary. Others are just as sauced, bopping and swaying to the live music that shakes the rafters and vibrates the glass in your hand. Tonight’s punk rock cover band is a constant tidal soundwave of childhood tunes that drowns your ears in a hundred and twenty decibels of numbing nostalgia. This is the perfect place to kill a person. Just like the classic verdigris Alien poster hanging in your apartment bedroom warns, nobody will hear you scream. And you’re easy pickings—the only soul not wearing green clothes.

Your murderer closes the distance, weaving his way through the throng of patrons dressed in the same emerald glory. You check the bruise on your arm and feel the sting of a dozen pinches. You need to wake up. So, you press an index finger and thumb together around the livid stain one more time. Wince. You’re awake. Or are you?

If only you had camouflaged appropriately, or at least donned the pea-colored sweater knitted by your grandmother or the aquamarine jeans your ex said didn’t compliment your thighs.

Your horror-stricken pulse is interrupted by a newcomer—an unshaven stranger who offers to buy you a drink.

He asks, “Where’s yah green duds? I oughta pinch yah.”

You shrug and glance around for your killer, but he’s disappeared into the sea of dancers. The bartender pours forest green beer into your glass. Your new buddy toasts to a lucky night, and you sip out of habit. The drink is bile in your throat. Once your killer finds you, he’ll save you from the coming hangover. You stumble off the stool.

“Hey,” says your beer companion. “Where you go’n?”

Too late. “Semi-Charmed Life” is the new track in a series of retro songs belted out by a man on stage dressed like a fat leprechaun, and now your killer appears in front of you. He’s there in the flesh, just behind your new drinking friend, whose ashen face twists with mouth gaping in a muffled cry. The victim collapses just as the long knife exits his back and returns to its hiding spot within the killer’s green jacket. The dead man slumps against a wooden post, his mortal wound hidden in the shadows. Nobody notices or moves to help. Your unlucky pal is just another drunk passed out from too much revelry.

Run. The word pierces the haze of your sloshy brain again and again. Every hair on your skin is rigid. Run, run, run.

You turn and flee toward the bathroom. A safe harbor? Far from it. You spring for the stall underneath the window, which is barred. So you lock the etched, spray-painted door and stand hunched over on the toilet. Now, you’re invisible. Maybe he won’t hear you breathe?

Your killer’s dark eye presses against the door’s slit—a marble rolling in a sinister socket.

“No green?” his chalky voice echoes off the tile. “Not very festive.”

The door crashes inward.

A viselike grip drags you to the floor.

The bloodstained knife raises…

A screen glitches before your eyes, and the virtual reality goggles slide off.

Fluorescent light pierces your open retinas. The room is painted sterile white, a white mirrored in the lab coat worn by the woman with black hair. She’s standing above you, tapping an electronic tablet with a bony index finger. “Tom?”

A man enters your view and shakes his head. The black-haired woman curses.

“Same deal. Neural video… too hazy,” Tom says.

“The Green Coat?”

“No dice.”

“Run voice analysis. Facial tracker?”

“Still blurry. Victim 12 was drunk.”

She cusses. “After a dozen simulations—”

“We could try a hundred more… this one’s signal feed will always cut out at the time of death.”

The black-haired woman mumbles to herself, looking into your unblinking eyes. “We can revisit your final two minutes, but only in low-definition. Poor research funding is unfair, isn’t it, Victim 12?”

“Victim 12’s neural microchip is a government patent.”

“Doesn’t matter. Run the memory-stream again.”

Tom checks his own electronic tablet. “The serial killer’s face… we need complete clarity. Let’s try Victim 10—the Baptist.”

“Only Victim 12 saw Green Coat’s profile.”

Your legs. Why won’t they move?

The woman leans over you again. “Victim 12, I know we’re asking the impossible. But unless you help us now, you won’t be his last target. Okay?”

“They can’t hear you, you know?” The assistant huffs and leaves the room.

The black-haired woman jabs the tablet. Nearby, a soft whirring starts, a machine clicking into higher gear.

The VR mask eases over your eyes as the world around you turns into a four-dimensional landscape—an Indianapolis bar on St. Patrick’s Day. Sights, sounds, and smells return. You’re sitting on a stool. The rock band is playing.

Your murderer wears a green coat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lincoln Reed is a professor, writer, and editor. He holds a BA in film and media production from Taylor University and an MFA in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio. More than a dozen of his short stories are featured in online publications and print anthologies.

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