Nazi Sharks! (4 page)

Her fibrosis-ridden remaining
arms and legs splashed rapidly and finlike, despite incredible
blood-loss. She had no intention of dying out here, and doggonnit
she was a fighter!

She thought she could feel
shore beneath her. She felt relief for a moment. Then she realized
it wasn’t shore at all—it was shark! A shark with a massive
erection, no less. In that hideous moment of dying from extreme
blood-loss, Tracy realized that shark bastard was enjoying—really,
really enjoying—her agonizing death. The joke was on him, though,
her final thought ran. She died forgiving the shark, just as Jesus
would have done. (Maybe?)

Betty had chosen to swim off at
an angle, hoping to lure the sharks away from her friends and save
their lives. But it hadn’t worked. As if the sharks knew her
thinking all along, the savage beasts had devoured her friends
first while she had to watch in sobbing horror. She could taste her
tears well, because as salty as was the sea, it could never be as
salty and bitter as the tears over losing such wonderful
friends.

Now she was the last of her
group and the fins were all pointed toward her. Almost as in a
dream, she seemed to scarcely be moving at all, despite her
aggressive efforts. Yet, she was certainly swimming much faster
before!

“This is how Arnold must have
felt,” Betty told herself, looking behind her. It was then she
noticed the ordinarily omnipresent image of her very
well-developed, white rump was not hovering in her thrown-back
vision. Where had her ass gone? Why couldn’t she feel her legs?

Oh!

Suddenly the fact that she was
seeing herself being embraced in a giant seal pup’s arms made
sense. She was hallucinating and she was dying—just about dead,
really.

The sharks made an abrupt right
angle and, in formation, swam back out to sea, their delicious,
kind-hearted meal finished. They left the beach much more bloody
and much less sexy than they’d found it.

Chapter 7

My underlings do not trust me.
They believe I, Sigmund Sigersbaum, have been filching the sweet,
American peanut butter. Why would I do this? I import this
noxiously delicious substance at great risk to myself. Clearly it
is the Commandant. Also, they wonder what the hell I was thinking
when I came up with this whole shark idea.

They don’t understand.

Hitler is most demanding. We
were all in his ballroom for his latest soiree. The finest German
minds were making witty comments about mushrooms, which were
extremely fashionable that week. Men in monkey costumes were
juggling assault rifles. The most uddersome farmgirls of Austria
were straddling canons and reading from Nietzsche. There was I,
grandson of the greatest pharmaceutical researcher in the Reich, a
chemist by virtue of well-placed bribes and yet known only for my
extensive research into cartoons of women with humungous
blitzkriegs. (My family had crowbarred me into the soiree with
bribes and sexual favors—anything to get me out of their
basement.)

“So, Sigmund Sigersbaum,” the
Fuhrer declared, after chuckling at some incoherent drivel about
the shiitake, “you are a scientist. Come up with something amazing.
Or I will bake you into a pie.”

I wasn’t even aware the Fuhrer
liked meat pies. But I had no time to think of that. I had no time
to think at all. I was terrified. All were looking at me, and I
wasn’t even doing my spinning bowtie trick. The sweat was beginning
to drip onto my hunky, blond eyebrows.

“Exploding butterflies!” I
proclaimed with feigned confidence.

The Fuhrer suggested this idea
bore a distinctly ‘fruity’ flavor I would be wise to discard. I
began describing how the butterfly-induced carnage would be
thoroughly manly and gruesome, but he began describing how much
better exploding Sigersbaums would be instead. I got his point.

I heard the hands of the clock
ticking away my doom. The monkeys gripped their assault rifles in
suspense. The farmgirls milked themselves reflexively. I blurted
the most badass thing I could think of—anything to save my
hairless, white hide.

“SS super-intelligent
laser-blasting robot sharks?” I posed tentatively.

I heard a round of scoffs,
suppressed laughs, and whispers from the guests. I mentally
prepared a list of reasons of why I would make a terrible pie.

I had, of course, placed zero
thought into the possibility or even plausibility of bringing such
a concept into existence. I hadn’t even realized I had constructed
a coherent series of words. I knew nothing about sharks, lasers, or
robots, let alone how one would combine the three. Yet, it was out
now, hanging in the air, not unlike the spleen of the last man who
disappointed Hitler.

The Fuhrer glanced up from his
pedicure. His pudding-like white face, with those blackberry eyes
gave me the most astonished expression. It could either mean I was
going to die or was going to get pregnant. He’s a hard man to
read.

“That,” he said carefully,
“is,” he added thoughtfully, “awesome.”

He promoted me to
Researchmeister on the spot. I had not expected to be any kind of
Meister, if I must be frank. I was given my own lab, with a series
of assistants, and set over me was Commandant Nichtleif, a brute
with no refinement for science or sharks.

That we make any progress at
all still confuses me. Countless bodies of mutilated sharks sit in
the storage locker. Sharks sewn onto bears, sharks with grenades
for teeth, sharks with human hands and genitals (it just seemed
right—don’t judge me). But we have now sharks that will assemble
for the Great Anthem and watch
Triumph of the Will
without
falling asleep. Are these true sharks, or merely my assistants in
shark costumes? I await further test results.

Chapter 8

His light-brown fingers gripped
the tail of the shark so intensely they turned a repugnant
off-white only the most daring interior decorators would touch.
With a swift thrust, bringing his slender forearm against a stringy
bicep, the mass of tentacles in the shark’s mouth flew behind him
and stung the tender flesh of his back.

“Sink your teeth into me,
Mighty Jaws!” the man declared, as he beat himself again with the
novelty shark flog. “Make me one with you!”

He then prostrated himself
before the massive, fibreglass statue of the shark from
Jaws
, easily the size of a dwarf on tiptoes. The statue was
propped against two, round boulders, so as to point directly to the
Heavens, an affront to a bogus theology that promoted weakness and
self-sacrifice. Or just because it was kinda wobbly.

Around the fearsome shrine, on
every wall, were posters from such cinematic gems as
Devilfish
,
Jaws 3-D
,
Shark Exorcist
,
Ghost
Shark
,
Swamp Shark II: Trailer Park Shark
,
Shark
Night
,
Sewer Sharks
, and, of course, the Japanese
romance epic
Rape Shark 2
(which is really more of a remake
than a sequel). But given prominence, filling the entire back wall
of the shrine, was
Jaws
, the prehensile beast arousing
itself from the deep for that delicious morsel of womanly
flesh.

“Oh Mighty Sharks,” he resumed
from his prostrated position, “accept my sexy sacrifices with a
godly belch! Never do they intimidate you with their succulent
bosoms or humiliate you with their plush lips; at best, they give
you indigestion. Such is your greatness!”

The rubber shark puppets that
hung from the ceiling regarded him with cold, plastic scepticism,
reminding him, as his father always had, of what a pathetic
girly-man he was. The shark statues and figurines kept their
open-mouthed aloofness, even that pink quartz shark he’d been
calling ‘Carlsbad.’ And the firm, plush shark that he figured would
speak in a Jamaican accent but would—funny thing—not like
Reggae—even that shark mocked him.

“I do it all for you!” he
implored them. He figured they knew he meant the sacrifices, not
banal things like urinating or making Ramen noodles.

“I am weak and impotent. You,
great sharks, are all powerful. I will punish more girls. I will
make them sacrifices for you.”

The paintings of the sharks
cast that same, sorrowful grin his way, a grin that says, ‘That
last diver gave me diarrhea.’ Yet, they were pleased.

“I will sacrifice them for you,
o sharks, for they make a sacrilege of your waters with their
insatiable vaginas and arrogant milkducts.”

He rose to a full hooker-kneel
and flogged himself one last time before the expected dinging of a
nearby bell. He knew then and there his low-fat raviolis were
ready.

Chapter 9

“This man is weak and
impotent,” the FBI agent explained. His face was rat-like and
twitched nervously, not like a man with a secret, but like a man
who knows his blonde joke isn’t remotely funny and insists on
telling it all the same.

“That’s the key,” he continued.
“He’s weak and impotent and that’s why he worships sharks. They’re
symbolic of phallic potency. Each one a swimming, massive erection.
You see? Because his noodle’s floppier than a dead cat. But he
can’t take responsibility for that. He can’t say, ‘Yeah, this is my
penis, as useful in bed as a sudoku puzzle, but still mine.’ As any
limp-dicked sociopath must do, he blames the girls. He views
himself as a horny shark with a frigid date. And so, after killing
the girls, he must bite them. If you can find a man who fits that
profile, you’ll have your Shakatitt Shark.”

As the esteemed Agent Warren,
master profiler sent in from Quantico by a clerical error, finished
explaining the profile he’d drawn up, he settled into a slightly
less-nervous state of fidgeting with his shirt-tuck. If there was a
God, he figured shirts would tuck in much more comfortably. There
was always a wrinkle, a fold, something off and he could feel it
with his whole being. A metaphor for life.

Sheriff Babbage regarded the
nervous man and his strange, sullen partner from behind eyebrows of
steel wool and a pipe exuding the exhaust of extreme cogitation. At
last, taking the pipe from his mouth with an ancient treasure-map
of a hand, he let the intruding agents in on his thoughts.

“Well, see here, Agent Warren,”
the Sheriff began. The agents already knew where this was going. A
sheriff, especially one over 50, doesn’t say ‘see here’ if he plans
on agreeing. ‘See here’ is always a bad thing. “That’s a fine
hunch. A hunch of great depth and education. Fact man, myself. A
hunch—it’s the sorta thing’ll kill your pa and rape your ma while
you watch. Facts you can bring home, maybe marry some day, have a
few kids, make a crib for ‘em with that maple that fell a few years
yonder in the storm and you just been savin’ for the right ‘casion.
They grow up, become senators or governors and say it’s thanks to
my pa, made us a crib with his own two hands and never let us
down.”

Agent Warren regarded his
partner with a confusion he usually reserved for re-runs of
Night Court
. Agent Walker only sighed, as if to say, ‘It’s
never easy, especially when the local sheriff can recall the
Titanic.’

“Well, yes,” Warren replied
agreeably, “but you see, Sheriff, I’m connecting, or breeding if
you prefer, the facts within my mind and extracting from its cloaca
the very ideas I’m putting before you. It’s a working theory. It
may not be perfect, but I’ll bet it’s pretty close.”

“He’s often right,” Walker
noted. “But who knows? Nothing’s reliable. Not really. Life’s an
Asian hooker and we’re all her well-used ping-pong balls.”

Here was another kind of
skeptic, the Sheriff thought. Not a man who loves facts, and only
facts, but a man who thinks two-plus-two could equal a bad night in
a Belgian fruitcake factory, who thinks every step could be into
quicksand, the abyss, or just a clown’s floppy mouth—and this man
didn’t care at all.

“We have to work on something,
Sheriff,” Warren urged the cogitating old man, standing up now for
emphasis and because Kyle, his invisible, talking moose friend,
told him to. “Six girls are now missing. He took out a whole damn
team—”

“Maybe,” the sheriff
interrupted with a calmness born of age, detachment, and assurance
of death’s constant nearness. The calmness of mammoth teats. “Maybe
not,” he added ponderously. “Coulda been they were hit by a bus.
Coulda been they were eaten by sharks. Coulda been the killer, too.
That’s why I don’t much like coulda. Coulda’s the kinda thing’ll
kick your dog in the peanuts and sell ya the insurance on it.
Facts’ll just give him a strip of bacon—just one, ‘cause a dog’s
heart can’t handle the grease a man’s can.”

Weren’t small-town, antique
sheriffs supposed to rely exclusively on intuition, gumption, and
apple pie? This whole thing was ass-over-tea-kettle wrong and
Warren felt caught in a maelstrom of uncertainty and chaos so
strong he was screaming, screaming in his mind! That’s when Kyle
saved the day again, “You got this!” the moose said, his kindly,
Canadian eyes reassuring as ever. Solid intellect, focused like a
rapier—not that anyone uses those anymore—reclaimed the throne of
Warren’s powerful mind. They would find the facts, and his logic
would be as irresistible as a lonely sailor boy.

Chapter 10

Kevin Costner stood like a
king, a very ill-dressed king, on his plywood stage, admiring the
view of his kingdom. He’d had his fill of beaches, oceans, and
sunshine—no, the view he admired was one of voluptuous beau-tocks
in neat, little clusters of huddled bikini girls, pep-talking
themselves for the semi-finals. Mentally, he was inside each of
those clusters, batting away at their creamy speedbags with his
tongue—which was a pair of boxing gloves, he wasn’t sure why, but
it was arousing all the same.