The door from the café's kitchen swung shut with a decisiveness that caused Gene to bolt upright, wrenching his attention from the newspaper; an unsettling article about the Manson trial.

"So, then, what is it that tips the scales between Gene sticking around and Gene leaving?"  A waitress, sort of familiar, was all of a sudden leaning over his table, the buttons on her too-tight, striped shirt straining.

It was all Gene could do to hold her gaze.  All he could do to keep his attention from drifting down, down, down-

And he was caught.

"Pssst, I'm up here," she said, pointing at her face.  She wasn't smiling.  Not even a bit.  "What is it that keeps Gene Allen Pleasant, God's gift to women, hanging around?  What is it that keeps a fella from creeping out before dawn?  Just what can a poor girl do to make a fella settle down?"

It was all there.  The nerves doing their thing.  Heart palpitations.  Palms sweating.  Laboured breathing.  All part of a complex acute stress response designed to push Gene into fight or flight.

"Listen I-" But he had nothing.

The vexed waitress - Gena, as her nametag indicated - stood back, hands on her hips, and smirked.  "Don't even remember me, huh?"

She leant in closer, ranting on about the objectification of women.  Prattling on, Gene thought.  Vacant, he watched her lips move, and felt the heat of her breath, her hostile words, hot on his face, all spearmint gum, vanilla lip gloss, and vitriol.

He'd allow her this moment, he decided.  She deserved it.

Allowing Gina to voice her opinion, Gene withdrew to the darker, quieter, recesses of his mind, a peaceful place, and watched those lips move.  Those red, red lips.  Those moist, red, sensuous lips, bright white teeth, and pink tongue.

Hiding in the coat room, Gene's vantage point from behind a bunch of coats allowed him a nice unobstructed view of the lab.  It was from there that he had a clear view of a white-coated bespectacled man walking in, a man he presumed was the pathologist.  The doctor grabbed a black telephone from its cradle on the wall and dialled a number; he spoke something into the handset which Gene's dead ears were unable to make out.

At once, Gene felt like a stalking predator, and wondered if he might be a vampire.  Entertaining the thought of drinking blood, he felt around inside his mouth with an index finger.  No discernible fangs.  Watching the doctor wash his hands in a corner sink, his neck exposed, Gene focused on making his fangs grow.  He thought about biting into the doctor, and wished the doctor were a woman so the thought didn't seem so weird.

Hands clean, the doctor dried them on a soft cloth towel while walking across the room.  Having just passed Jacqueline's re-covered corpse, he paused, a perplexed look on his face.  He turned his head toward the cadaver, took a step backward, and lifted a corner of the sheet before recoiling, dropping it back into place.  Now frantic, he glanced around the room, seizing a clipboard on a string from the head of the steel stretcher.

The doctor's pupils widened as he soaked up the words on the page, and his head snapped upward, his face gone ashen, his mouth agape.

"Paul?  Paul, I thought it was quitting time hours ago."  He listened, trembling a bit.  "This one was all closed up."  He paused again, scanning the room.

Gene began to wish he were a ghost, invisible, able to just float out of there; but he knew that wasn't the case.

"It's right here:" the doctor confirmed, his index finger running across the clipboard, "Reconstituted subject  Completed for export.  Paul?"

He then dropped the clipboard, allowing it to swing from the bed, and turned on his heel.  The doctor made a beeline for the telephone.  Gene knew he had to act.

"Hurr," he grunted, "hurrrrr."  He stumbled out from behind the coats with a scalpel still in hand.  "Notsh sho fasht, I-"

"Jesus, Paul, enough with the games," the doctor sighed, his shoulders relaxing.  He stopped and turned back.  "I almost thought-" He froze.  "What...?  Who...?"  He almost fainted as he spotted Gene's naked, stapled-up torso.  He looked back to Gene's face.

The doctor screamed.

Gene lunged forward, the sheet falling from his waist, as the doctor scrambled backward.  Gene grabbed the doctor, and both men crashed into the workbench, knocking over a bunch of glass equipment which smashed to bits on the floor.

The men rolled around, locked in combat, until Gene's staples came loose, and both combatants were slick with his blood.  It wasn't long before he managed to overpower the doctor with a solid punch to the face preceding a firm chokehold.  Gene held the scalpel up to the doctor's throat.

"What the hell am I?" He growled into the doctor's ear.

"I don't-I don't-" the doctor gasped, his face turning purple.

"That heart was mine.  It's been stolen."

"I-I don't know what-!"

"Don't lie to me.  The tag - it's written right there.  I'm... heartless."

"Then how-"

"Right, I don't know either."

"I-"

"I do know, though, that I'm going to be needing a new one."

With that, Gene plunged the scalpel into the doctor's neck unleashing a gusher of bright red blood.  A little got into his mouth, and Gene found the taste to be less than appealing.  He guessed he might not be a vampire after all.

Gene awoke with a start in the middle of the night, tangled in strange sheets with a terrible hangover.  Beside him rested the nonspecific slumbering form of an unknown female.  With practised stealth, he raised his head to inspect the bed's other occupant, but caught little more than pale, smooth flesh and the delicate curve of a neck.  He rested back on the pillow, thinking, ransacking his porous, tequila worm-eaten mind, but could piece together no events from the previous night.

Taking great care, Gene untwisted himself from the linens, sitting up on the edge of the bed, before calling on instinct to slink catlike around the moonlit room picking up his clothes.  From his new angle, Gene was still unable to get a clear look at the slumbering figure, and a pang of panic struck him.

What did I do? he worried.  Who was she?  Was she at least good-looking?

Silent as can be, he crept out the bedroom door; he was a veritable ghost, floating down the darkened hall.  It was almost as though he'd been there before - and he had, of course, been in that exact situation countless times.

Shrugging into clothes, reeking of all last night's sins, Gene sneaked into the unidentified girl's living room, scanning the walls for photographs.  A high school photo of a fresh-faced cheerleader, all smiles and innocence leapt out at him.  Cute teenager.  Next, a college graduation photo, radiating pride and enthusiasm, all grown up and poised to take on life.  Not too long ago, Gene thought.  At last, he discovered a stack of disorganised pictures on the coffee table - photos from a recent trip to some white beach - and it was confirmed: she was still hot.

The doctor's heart felt weird in Gene's chest.  Like it wasn't the right size.  Too small, he thought.  That, and it wasn't wired up at all.  That could be a problem.  Gene wondered if perhaps he could heal.  He laid down on the steel table beside Jacqueline, naked and covered in blood.  One of his hands held closed the massive wound in his chest, the other gripping Jacqueline's lifeless hand.

He focused on healing, imagining all the veins and arteries meeting up, meshing, closing.  For a time, his brain in overdrive, he thought he might be accomplishing something.  There was a hint of tingle in his chest.  He thought he felt a little spark of something.  He dreamt of a time when he might be whole again, whole and unblemished; not missing parts and stapled together like some freakish Frankenstein.

There was a slight tingle, a kind of far off growing warmth in Gene's chest.  But it wasn't good enough.  He needed his own heart.  He would have to find out who took it, and he'd have to get it back.

Self-conscious now, Gene held together the gruesome flaps of skin on his chest as he sat up on the cold table.  Then, he reached into the wound, through his saw-ravaged ribcage, and grabbed the doctor's heart, withdrawing it.  Casual as ever, he tossed it into a metal garbage can on the floor.

"Won't be needing this," he shrugged, and hopped off the table, trudging off toward the showers.

A fine salt mist kissed their cheeks, carried on the cool hush of ocean breeze.  The crashing of primeval waves.  All of this set against an almost unreal awning of black, pierced through with liquid white stars and an enormous, jaundiced moon.  Alone now, Sarah talked and Gene listened.  The banquet was little more than a far off clamour of decadence, with its incessant clinking of glasses and affected laughter.

There was contact then.  What should have been a plain old touch.  It wasn't a first for Gene, that's true, but it was somehow different then, bringing with it a fervent desperation, a manic wanting, a spark.  Fingers tippled across the terrace railing, stumbling through the dim with an intoxicated single-mindedness known all too well to the fellow damned.  There, somewhere near the middle of that vast oaken plain, so close to the exact centre of the expansive universe, his fingers found those waiting others, hers, enabling the release of a slight electrostatic charge.  An exchange of primordial potential crackled out from the beginning of time, exploding from the actual centre of it all, outward, through aeons, through countless hosts, and out of Sarah's fingertips right into Gene's.