Morbius

by Brendan Deneen

  Amanda stood up, nodded. Were those tears in his eyes?

  “I… I’m sorry, Matt.”

  “So am I, Amanda.”

  * * *

  THE PHONE behind the bar rang, rattling Liz and causing her to drop the pen she’d been holding.

  It was almost closing time… 1:45 a.m. and the bar was nearly empty. Liz was working on a crossword puzzle and about to pull her hair out. She hated these things, wasn’t sure why she kept trying to do them, but her mom had always said they were good for you, that it was good to push your brain a little harder than it wanted to be pushed.

  She missed her mom. She’d died years earlier. Cancer. It had happened so fast. Liz had never been the same, and neither had her dad, even though the two were divorced. She swallowed down sadness as the image of her dad’s pale face rose unbidden in her mind. It was almost too much to handle sometimes. She just wished she could do more.

  Liz turned around and grabbed the phone a little more aggressively than she’d intended.

  “Dive Inn, whaddaya want?”

  “Liz? It’s Amanda.”

  “’Manda? What’s up? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah… um… I’m fine,” the voice on the other end of the line breathed. “But I need help. Do you know anyone who works at any hospitals? I can’t get any more plasma for Michael, and I’m afraid of what might happen when he finds out.”

  * * *

  THE NIGHT settled on Alphabet City, that part of the Lower East Side where the avenues were named with letters, rather than numbers.

  Liz had taken a spot at a table inside the bar, sipping from a glass of bourbon on the rocks, staring out onto the streets of Manhattan. She didn’t usually drink at work, but it was past closing time, she was the only one there, and she figured she had earned it. It had been a busy night earlier, so much so that she’d barely been able to catch her breath until about 1 a.m., but her boss was too cheap to hire an extra bartender on crazy nights like this.

  It had mostly been regulars, but there was one creepy-looking guy who’d sat alone at a table and never touched the drink he’d bought. Liz had caught him staring at her more than once, but it was New York City, so what was she gonna do? She’d seen and experienced worse.

  Then on top of everything, the panicked phone call from Amanda. She had managed to talk her friend down and deal with a pissed off, drunk customer rolling into the bar at the same time. Multitasking was one of the many talents her boss ignored. Well, a glass of his best bourbon after-hours was the least he could do for his best—and often only—employee.

  Sighing, she stared at the ice cubes as they melted into the brown liquid. It tasted so good but she wasn’t getting much pleasure out of it right now. Today’s audition had been a mess. Between her dad and her waning acting career, and the bloodsucker sleeping in the room next to hers, life hadn’t been going exactly as she’d planned it.

  The front door rattled. Liz looked up to see Fabian standing there, backlit by a passing car, his features disturbingly blacked out. But she knew his posture, the way he hunched his shoulders, that same green army jacket he always wore. Good ol’ Fabian. The best worst person to know in a city like this.

  Liz lifted herself out of her seat, at the same time finishing her drink in a single gulp. The ice cubes clinked against her teeth and she smiled as the bourbon burned her throat. Walking over to the door, she unlocked it and ushered Fabian inside.

  “Hey,” he said, walking in like he owned the place.

  “Hey yourself,” she responded, smiling, closing the door behind him and locking it. They had dated on-and-off for years, the kind of mind-bending, whirlwind romance she had only read about as a kid. Of course, it was messier than the books and movies she’d experienced when she was younger, never as neat or clean as the happy ending of a fictional story. Too many tears shed on too many drunken nights. But Fabian was generally a good guy, even if he did run with some tough characters now and then. He didn’t mess around on her when they were together, and was always up front when he needed a break, never got angry when she asked for one. Always showed up when she needed help.

  Like tonight.

  Fabian walked behind the bar and poured himself a shot of cheap tequila, downed it without batting an eye. She sat back down at a table by the window, watched him while he poured another. He looked different tonight. There were worry lines etched into his forehead and he seemed tense, which wasn’t a word she would normally use to describe Fabian Jones.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Huh?” he said, the second shot at his lips. His eyebrows rose and fell, as if attempting to answer her question, then he drank the alcohol and walked back around the bar, sitting down across from her. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Okay. You just look—”

  “I said I’m fine,” he said, slamming his open palm on the table. Liz recoiled as if she’d been hit. Fabian was never violent, at least not around her, despite what she heard about the things he did out on the streets. She looked at him more closely as the sound faded. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “It’s… it’s been a long night.”

  “It’s okay. Really,” Liz answered. “I’m sorry that I even bothered you. I know your nights can get crazy, and I know my request was really weird. I just figured you might—”

  Fabian interrupted her by reaching into his leather jacket and tossing a plastic vial of blood onto the table.

  At least it looked like blood.

  The color was off. Almost black. Liz had never seen blood like this before.

  “What… how?”

  “You wanted blood, right?” he answered. “Well, there you go.” He sat back, his usual cocky grin finally slithering back onto his face.

  “But I just told you I needed it, like, a couple hours ago. I just figured you might know someone who works in a hospital, that maybe you could connect me with someone or get some in a few days or something. I didn’t expect… wow.”

  “You happened to catch me at the right time,” Fabian said, looking out the window as a loud group of teens ran by. “A friend of mine works at Midtown General and was just getting off when I called him. He was able to grab this one. That’s it, though. He said it was too dangerous for him to get any more.”

  “No, this is great,” she said. “I honestly wasn’t expecting… but why does it look so weird?”

  Fabian glanced at the packet of dark red fluid that lay between them.

  “No idea.” His expression said he didn’t care. “You want it or not?”

  “Sure, thanks. Beggars can’t be choosers.” She picked it up, suppressing a sudden wave of nausea. It even felt strange. “Which friend?”

  “Huh?”

  “Which friend works at Midtown General? You never mentioned him before.”

  “Oh. Uh… Francis.”

  “Francis?”

  “Yeah, Francis. Why you givin’ me a cross-examination? Did I come through for you or what?”

  “Yeah,” she said, scrutinizing him. She had never seen Fabian act so twitchy before, but maybe he’d just had a bad night, like he said. She heard the rumors about some of the stuff he did, some of the people he ran with, and she always made a point of not asking too many questions. She liked him, and didn’t want to hunt down any reason to feel otherwise. “Yeah, you came through for me, Fabian. What do I owe you?”

  “Well, it cost me an arm and a leg… but how about you and me go out this weekend on a date. Like, a real one. Dinner and a movie. Something like that.”

  He stared at her for a long time and she watched as he visibly relaxed. This was the Fabian she knew, the one she had originally fallen for. A confident guy but gentle underneath. Never really worried, even when life threw curveballs in his direction. She hadn’t recognized the Fabian that had appeared a few minutes earlier. She was glad that guy was gone.

  A grin broke open on Liz’s face.

  “Deal,” she replied.


  CHAPTER THREE

  MORBIUS HELD the packet of dark blood in his hands.

  He could feel Amanda’s and Liz’s eyes on him but he ignored them, instead tried to discern what he was looking at. He was, after all, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He knew better than anyone the intricacies of blood and its components. He’d studied this vital liquid more than any of his super-powered contemporaries, and certainly drank more than them, too.

  The thought almost made him laugh… a mirthless humor that sometimes threatened to consume him.

  Michael Morbius had never seen blood like this.

  “Here, why don’t we do this a little differently,” Liz said, walking over to the kitchen and rummaging around in a couple of drawers and cabinets. Morbius looked over at Amanda, his only friend in the world. She smiled and shrugged. She had told him that she’d lost her job at the hospital, and he knew she was upset about it. Some distant emotional corner hidden within him felt bad about that fact.

  Liz returned after a moment with a gold-colored chalice and a pair of scissors.

  “Where did you get that?” Amanda asked, laughing. With the darkness of night lurking outside the apartment’s dirty window, the laugh reverberated with a gallows humor.

  “The goblet? Medieval Fun. My dad dragged me there a few years ago. Before, you know. It’s tacky as hell, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Seems appropriate now.”

  Liz gently placed her fingers on the plastic vial, and Morbius’ head snapped up. His eyes locked on hers, and then ventured down to her bare neck. She had never let him come this close to her before. At least not willingly. She couldn’t stop her fingers from trembling.

  “Here,” she barely got out. “Let me help you.”

  After a moment, the muscles in Morbius’ face relaxed, then his hands, and he let go. Liz nodded nervously and brought up the scissors, slicing open the top of the packet. Like the experienced bartender she was, she poured the dark liquid into the goblet without spilling a drop. Its smell was nearly overwhelming. He had never experienced anything like it before—not unpleasant, but not exactly pleasant either.

  Liz’s expression, however, made it pretty clear she didn’t like it.

  “Bottoms up,” she whispered, holding the goblet out to Morbius. He nodded his head slightly, and took hold of it. His claws gently raked her skin and she shivered visibly, though she held her ground.

  Morbius held the goblet up and inhaled deeply through his flattened, deformed nose. Every molecule in his body seemed to come alive at the mere scent of this blood. He held it away from himself for a moment, tried to see exactly what he was about to drink, but it was thick and opaque.

  “This smells different than ordinary human blood,” Morbius mused. “Where did you say you got it?”

  “My friend, Fabian. He… knows people. I didn’t ask too many questions.”

  Morbius considered this answer. His scientific brain told him to get more information, but the vampire in him told the scientist to shut up. He looked up at Amanda, who smiled and raised her chin.

  Go ahead, she said with her eyes.

  Morbius nodded and slowly tipped the goblet toward his lips. This was packaged blood, just like he’d been suffering through for weeks, but it was also different on a molecular level, he suspected. He hadn’t felt this excited since his teeth had last sunk into the neck of an unwilling victim. He cursed himself for how much he loved that memory. How much he loved the memory of every single one of them. He’d never thought it was possible to love and hate something with such equal fervor.

  The goblet touched his lips. Despite looking like metal, it was cheap plastic, but he ignored that and tipped the receptacle farther, the liquid slowly oozing down toward his tongue.

  He took in a single breath.

  The first drop of the blood touched his tongue.

  And everything changed.

  Morbius’ senses exploded. The entire apartment tunneled. The ceiling seemed to explode and then reconstruct itself into a crystalline form. He could hear the two women breathing, could smell the sweat on their skin, but when he looked at them, all he could see were their veins, spreading out like mazes across the outlines of their bodies. The room went blindingly bright and then dark, then strobed different colors.

  Gathering himself as best he could, Morbius gulped the rest of the blood, unable to feel the rest of his body as he did so. His skin was crawling, a strange warmth buzzing up and down from his stomach, his entire being seeming to fill up the room. A bizarre smile creased itself onto his face and a strange sound fell out of his mouth.

  Laughter. Coarse and guttural.

  Michael Morbius took two halting steps as the goblet fell from his clawed fingers, and then he burst through the window without opening it and out into the growing shadows of the night.

  * * *

  “WHAT THE hell was that?” Liz said, looking over at her friend. “Has he ever acted that way before?”

  Amanda walked toward the window, careful to avoid the few pieces of shattered glass that had ended up on the floor. She peered out, straining to see over the nearby rooftops, but Morbius was long gone.

  “No, never,” she murmured. Silently, she hoped he wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  Including himself.

  * * *

  MORBIUS TURNED his face up to the moon and smiled.

  Waves of pleasure rippled across his body, unlike anything he had ever experienced. He was back in his familiar perch at Fulton and Gold, a spot he liked because the darkness here seemed to wrap naturally around his body, shrouding him in almost perpetual shadows.

  He closed his eyes, but the moonlight only grew more intense for him, pushing past and through his skin, traveling down his throat and into his stomach and extending through his limbs, exploding out of his fingertips and toes. He laughed and reopened his eyes. The moon was a tiny dot in the starry distance, then blazed a path back to its rightful place, pulsing to the same rhythm as Michael’s own heartbeat.

  He slowed his breathing, tried to get ahold of himself. He had seen and done so many unbelievable things in his life, especially since the botched experiment, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling quite like this. Except perhaps when he was with Martine…

  The thought of her sent his mind spinning.

  He closed his eyes again as memories flooded into his reeling mind. For a moment, he was a boy again in Greece, holding his mother’s hand as she walked him to school. He’d been a bright child… too bright, bullied for what was considered his strange appearance and preternatural gifts at math and science. But his mother had always supported him, no matter what.

  Michael’s father—a writer, artist, and filmmaker—was almost never home, so Michael and his mother relied upon each other. She told him to ignore those other children, that they were jealous. He was destined for great things, she said.

  And then came the sickness.

  Michael had been called to the front of the class despite trying to hide himself in the back row, behind the rest of the students. His teacher knew he was bright, suspected he needed as much support as possible, so she asked him to come to the front and finish the math equation that had been stumping everyone else. Michael had already solved it in his head, but he didn’t want to stand in front of the others.

  The teacher insisted.

  The chalk trembling in his hand, not feeling all that well, Michael had begun to solve the equation when he coughed violently, and a splatter of thick, dark blood shot out of his mouth, spraying the chalkboard. The children yelled and some laughed, and the teacher recoiled. She had always been so nice to him—but now? Now she looked disgusted. Michael tried to apologize to her but instead he coughed again and this time the spray of blood covered her.

  The teacher’s innocent scream was the first of many he’d hear in his life.

  Despite their relative poverty, Michael’s parents somehow managed to have him seen by multiple doctors, but the diagnosis came back the same from each. He
suffered from a rare blood disorder, and would most likely live a short, pain-filled life.

  His mother never cried in front of him, but at night Michael could hear her weeping through the thin walls that separated their bedrooms.

  * * *

  BACK ON the rooftop, Michael opened his eyes and stared again at the moon, hoping its brightness would sear the painful memories from his mind. Yet even with his eyes open, the strange blood that Liz had given him coursed through his system, warping his senses, and more memories rose, unbidden.

  * * *

  HE WORKED hard in school, consistently coming at the top of his class despite his illness, and started a career as a scientist in Greece, happy to be free of the childishness and immaturity of his classmates. To his surprise and dismay, however, his unattractive appearance and brusque personality made him an outcast in the scientific community as well, even after he’d won a Nobel Prize. He had learned that academics acted like schoolyard bullies when presented with someone who didn’t look or act the “right” way.

  Undaunted, he moved to Athens, which beckoned to him like a tantalizing stranger, and the city had been everything he’d hoped.

  At least at first.

  On those streets, no one seemed to give Michael’s strange appearance a second glance. The Nobel money was enough for him to rent a studio apartment and buy some used furniture. It wasn’t much, but he was happy—when his blood didn’t betray him and send waves of breathtaking pain coursing throughout his body.

  He often found himself sleeping through the day and walking the still-busy streets at night. That was when he felt more at home, more alive in his own skin. The daylight revealed too much.

  Eventually the money began to run out, so he started looking for work. It took a few weeks, but one of his former classmates—one of the only kind ones—named Emil Nikos reached out and told Michael about a job opportunity.

  It was in a cutting-edge laboratory, hidden high in the hills outside the city, where they were studying the blood of animals, figuring out ways to better the human condition. It was perfect. Michael joined a team of dedicated scientists and no one seemed to mind his gaunt appearance or his quirky personality. In fact, they seemed to like both.