Chapter 8

"I'm making you a full partner, Buck," Peter informed his murderous cohort. "This'll make up for losing your wife and kids."

"They weren't my kids," Buck told him, his voice emotionless and even. "They just showed up on my doorstep one day and I..." he sighed. "I just had to have them."

"Fucked 'em blind, did you?" Peter chortled, then raised his beer in salute to the new partner of Artistic Suicides.

"Every chance I got!" Buck laughed, matching his tone with Peter's evil cackle.

With the press of a button on Peter's portable console, the transaction was complete and documented. Artistic Suicides was now, officially, one-half his.

"How many girls do you have in your herd, Peter?" Buck asked, dropping down on the living room couch and casually crossing his legs as he stretched them out on the coffee table.

"Oh, seven or eight right now," Peter told him. "I get two or three applications a week. I only take the pretty ones, the ones who want to die 'cause they can't have kids or they've lost their boyfriend or husband to some stupid cancer or something."

He continued, gloating with his evil accomplishments, "I lost half-dozen mebbe ten last week recording a shootout – "The Outlaw Girls of the O.K. Corral". That was great! Bleeding bellies, dead, tit-shot girls all over the place, Marshall Earp, that's me, going around afterward and shooting all the dead girls in the cunt to make sure none of the outlaws survived. Oh, God! I still get hard thinking about that!"

"You shoot the good girls, too?" Buck asked, making a point of adjusting his cock inside his shorts as though the story Peter told him was making him horny.

"Ain't no sech thing," Peter chuckled.

"Yeah, but the, um, shootout," Buck persisted. "There was a group of Outlaw girls, and a group of, um, deputies, right?"

"Oh, yeah, of course," Peter agreed, now that he was reminded of the fact that there had supposedly been a script; one that he hadn't given much attention.

"So, some of the girls were shot down by the outlaws, right?" Buck asked, definitely not having to pretend he was horny. Shooting girls was his favorite, most obsessed-over subject in the whole world.

"And your point?" Peter asked, wondering where this was going.

"You didn't cunt-shoot your deputies, did you?"

"O' course I did!" Peter declared. "Wasn't none of 'em gonna live, all tit shot and bleeding like that. I put 'em outta their misery!"

"So," Buck concluded, gazing over his bottle at Peter, "there weren't any winners of the shootout – except for you."

Peter grinned, reached down and adjusted his crotch. "Nope! They signed up t' be killed, and I killed 'em."

Buck chuckled, then unfolded his legs and got up to get another beer from the fridge. He opened the door and pulled a beer out, hearing "I'll take one," from the other room. Reaching around beside the refrigerator, Buck got what he needed and went back into the room where Peter waited.

"Where's mine?" he asked, looking up.

"Right here," Buck replied, his voice casual.

Peter didn't even feel the bullet that hit him right between his eyes.

Buck Simpson was now the sole owner of Artistic Suicides. No more innocent girls were going to be murdered, but he was going to make a fortune killing them – over and over and over again.

He went down to the studio to see if any of the girls had regenerated yet, badly needing to shove his cock into something hot, wet and bloody.

There were seven girls, according to the roster Buck was previewing at his new desk, seven girls who had signed up to be murdered. There were more applications that hadn't been approved, mostly due to some flaw in the girl's appearance. The first thing he was going to do was create a 'Department of Human Resources' and put Ronnie in charge. She wouldn't turn away a desperate girl just because of her looks.

He grinned, realizing that doing that would make Artistic Suicides a family owned business. A family owned business whose chief product was Snuff-tees. Pure despotism, that! He wasn't planning on changing the product, but he was going to do something about the rapid turnover in personnel. In the last five years, Peter had murdered almost a thousand women just to make his recordings. Among that thousand, some had been killed for personal pleasure, their deaths unrecorded and meaningless.

Peter may have been merciless, but he'd been a great financier. His company – Buck's company, now – had several million credits in assets, with more coming in every week from snuff-tees already on the market. He didn't intend to make any changes in the 'Assets and Acquisitions' department – that would kill the financial inflow. He would also have to continue making snuff-tees, but now, with help from the twins and from Ronnie, the performers were more likely to live through them.

He wondered what the performers might think, signing up to be 'snuffed', then waking up to discover they hadn't been. He grinned, remembering how Barbette had reacted when she'd awakened from having been machine gunned – furious, hurt, surprised, finally grateful. She was now one of Tia's students, learning everything she could about the twin's fiery witchcraft.

'Soon, those girls are gonna have a coven, ' he realized, wondering what the twins might do with that kind of power. Whatever it might be, it couldn't hurt. The world was dying, as he'd helped Tresia to understand just before he'd murdered her. Trish was a student, now, too, happy to still be alive and cured of her cancer.

"Do you still think moving the company to Milan was a good idea?" Tia asked, plainly frustrated about her lack of freedom to move about in the daytime. The proletariat had Enforcers who kept a strict curfew on its citizens, preventing them from accidently straying into the bright, cheery sunlight and getting their brains microwaved. To the witches of Tia's coven, the sun's effect on humanity wasn't important. Every female, as they learned the usage of witch fire, that flickering blue energy that the twins had mastered, was immune to the sun's unfiltered rays.

Buck Simpson sighed. He'd heard her complaints, and the complaints from the proletariat about her as well, for the last year – ever since he realized that Artistic Suicides would fare better in a big city, even though the living quarters of a million people were all underground.

"Repair of the underground entranceway to the abandoned Palazzo Lombardia is almost complete," Buck told his darling twenty-year-old niece. "As soon as it is, we can move in, lock, stock, bell, book and as many blue candles as you can carry," he added, referring to the witchcraft school she ran. "Nobody will bother you there, and we can continue the girl's training without interference from your favorite gendarmes."

Tia looked unconvinced, which could be dangerous, considering what she could do just by thinking about it.

"Look, darlin'," Buck began, which definitely added a scowl to her face, as he only called her 'darling' when trying to placate her. "We needed a larger fan base for Tara's Vampire Princess series, and we simply didn't have the broadcast capabilities or the trained personnel available in Avellino to handle a successful weekly drama. That's why I had Artistic Suicides relocated."

"So, you moved here to help Tara with her silly TV show," Tia grumbled.

"Yes, and for your school," Buck added, hoping that giving her an entire skyscraper for her ever-growing coven to play in would help fill in any rifts that moving to Milan had created between them. "There are also advanced education opportunities for you, as well. You are a brilliant physicist. Your thesis on Energy Transference in a Liquid Medium was accepted and published by Liceo Scientifico Statale. There aren't any twenty-year-old students of any physical science that can claim to be published."