Nazi Sharks! Read online

  Nazi Sharks!

  By Jared Roberts

  Copyright 2014 Bloody Melons Press

  Smashwords Edition

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  Swim to Your Favorite Chapter

  (We won’t question your motives)

  Chapter 1 – The Escape

  Chapter 2 – Seriously? Nazi Sharks?

  Chapter 3 – Kevin Costner

  Chapter 4 – The Bubblegum Queens

  Chapter 5 – The Cherry Bombs

  Chapter 6 – Changing Tide

  Chapter 7 – Excerpts from the Personal Diary of Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum, Loosely Translated by John Maynard Beans

  Chapter 8 – Shark Weak

  Chapter 9 – Making Sense of That Last Chapter

  Chapter 10 – Of Bimbos and Perverts

  Chapter 11 – Theories, Facts, and Guts

  Chapter 12 – More Excerpts from Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s Markedly Unscientific Research Diary

  Chapter 13 – Dangerous and Stupid

  Chapter 14 – Salt Water Titties

  Chapter 15 – The Big Date

  Chapter 16 – Go Figure

  Chapter 17 – Even More Excerpts from Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s Diary, a Glimpse into the Mind of a Misunderstood Man

  Chapter 18 – Shakatitt Showdown

  Chapter 19 – The Sheriff Refuses to Develop as a Character

  (Chapter 20 – A Conversation with John Maynard Beans)

  Chapter 21 – Factored Out

  Chapter 22 – The Bubblegum Queens Grieve

  and There Are Amusing Pop Culture References

  Chapter 23 – Freedom

  Chapter 24 – Foul Balls

  Chapter 25 – Yogurt Time!

  Chapter 26 – Debrief

  Chapter 27 – Excerpting the Hell out of Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s Diary

  Chapter 28 – Transcendental Mastication

  Chapter 29 – The Final Excerpt from Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s Diary, Just in Time to Explain How to Kill the Sharks

  Chapter 30 – Refried Beans

  Chapter 31 – Tits vs Sharks!!!

  Chapter 32 – Just Rewards

  Chapter 1

  The Escape

  “Did you peek?” Jonathan asked his fellow sailor.

  The fellow, whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn yet, adjusted his blue neckerchief ponderously. Clearly this was a man of depth. The sort of man whose neckerchief needs adjusting before an answer can be given. Or perhaps he merely itched. Jonathan wasn’t quick to judge, just optimistic.

  “Depends upon why you ask,” the sailor answered. His neckerchief was not one of depth, Jonathan realized, but of suspicion. He had probably killed a prostitute and took to freelance sailing as an escape. Maybe in the wind and sea, Jonathan thought, this man would find more than escape: maybe he’d find his soul.

  “Because I did,” Jonathan stated frankly, a quality in himself he always admired, “and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I heard rumors, y’know—my ears aren’t this big for nothing—” and Jonathan touched his jug ears for comic effect, lost on the nameless and tormented sailor, “that these sharks are Nazi sharks. And I thought to myself, ‘Jonathan, what in the name of the Virgin Mary’s love handles are Nazi sharks? Do they march? Do they hate Jews more than any other edible thing in the sea? That doesn’t make a lick of sense and you know it, so finish up this delicious French onion soup and just do your duty.’ I said all that, but then I thought I’d take a look.”

  “Well,” the man said impatiently, his sailor suit suddenly seeming ill-fitting, comically so. This man was neither deep nor a murderer of whores. He could scarcely stay focused for a single paragraph of conversation, how would he last a murder?

  “They have armbands,” Jonathan stated tersely.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “So you’re going to be pedantic, too?” Jonathan asked. “Finbands, then.”

  “I’m still not following you,” the sailor answered, adjusting that itchy neckerchief again. If a day were a failure for an itchy neckerchief, this man’s life amounted to a seagull’s ballsack.

  “Finbands with swastikas. Maybe glued on. Maybe stitched. Maybe they’re tattoos. Heck, I didn’t have time to do a full inspection—I said it was a peek and that’s what it was. But I’m telling you the verdict: we’ve got real Nazi sharks on board.”

  The sailor took this information soberly. His neck ceased itching and he gazed out into the clear sky and its dark, blue lover, the ocean, as they met on the horizon. Perhaps, beneath that incessantly itchy neck, the soul of a philosopher lurked after all. Jonathan wasn’t sure, but he studied the man and thought about it.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” the man suddenly observed. “Makes me remember why I became a sailor in the first place.”

  It was a banal observation, but Jonathan felt more kinship with the sailor than he’d felt with anyone in a while. He wasn’t going to complain.

  “The air,” Jonathan agreed, then realized he hadn’t finished the sentence.

  “Yep.”

  “Might as well get your name,” Jonathan risked.

  “Carlos,” he stated, adjusting his neckerchief. Jonathan doubted that was his name. The guy didn’t look Hispanic. His fingers were almost bone white as they dug into the sea-blue of the neckerchief.

  “Jonathan,” Jonathan stated.

  Carlos resumed his scrutiny of the horizon. Why bother? It hadn’t changed. Carlos irritated Jonathan with his quirks. They suggested so much more than was really there—and he’d just met the guy!

  “You don’t think those sharks can get out, do you?”

  So that’s what was bugging the guy. He was scared of sharks. Or Nazis. Or both. Heck, who can blame him? Who knows what a Nazi would do with a shark? Or vice-versa.

  “You kidding me?” Jonathan burst out with more enthusiasm and confidence than he’d really intended. “How many feet of Navy tested and re-tested steel comprises the multiple layers of the hull of this incredible vessel? It would take a torpedo from the Devil’s asshole to give us a mere dent, so what’s a flesh-and-blood shark gonna do? Hah! Get out.”

  Carlos accepted all of this soberly. He really was a sober man. Even less reason to believe the man Hispanic, Jonathan thought, but felt momentarily guilty because, ‘I’m no racist.’

  “I guess you’re right,” Carlos agreed with a sigh. The horizon reclaimed Carlos’s attention.

  Jonathan gazed right back at that horizon himself, because sometimes doing something together is better than doing nothing at all. The ship is a metaphor for society, Jonathan began pondering in his mind. Even the lingering taste of French onion soup couldn’t interfere with his sudden inspiration. Only the grinding teeth of a shark could— and did. The section of steel deck that had been beneath the sailors now bent in the shark’s titanium-reinforced jaws, creating a sandwich of sorts around Jonathan. A taco, he imagined Carlos might think—if Carlos really were Hispanic! Jonathan would never know for sure. The steel pressed with enough force to crush Jonathan’s pelvis, squirting his guts down the shark’s gullet and frothing out his own mouth like—like a Jonathan smoothie! he acknowledged with detached horror.

  The horizon seemed to be moving, but really i
t was him, arcing through the air in his assailant’s hateful mouth. Irrationally, he feared the cold, ocean water hitting his face, even as the multiple rows of teeth chomped his torso mercilessly, shredding his lungs into a convenient human mignon. Carlos’s head dropped across the horizon before Jonathan’s gaze like as though it were a chocolate-covered apple, splashing into the water just before his carrier shark did the same.

  Jonathan was about to undergo digestion, but, had he lived, he would’ve seen the remainder of the Nazi sharks arcing in a fearsome gray streak from the breached deck, their blood-red armbands—or finbands—flashing proudly the swastika across the horizon and out into the ocean. There they regrouped into an orderly, two-by-two formation. This rectangle of cold-blooded evil made its way to the nearest available shore, that little-known Delaware coastal town, Shakattit Beach.

  Chapter 2

  Seriously? Nazi Sharks?

  The Nazi UFO Secret had not struck him as quite so egregiously ill-informed, having been probed by both Germans and aliens in his time. Hitler’s Time-Traveling Androids was a documentary he had never bothered to watch, because it hadn’t been peer reviewed. But here he was, Bartholomew Skinner, a PhD with both a full head of hair and an IQ of 160, watching grainy footage of a formation of sharks supposedly engineered by devilish Nazi scientists. To do what? Attack Americans? Clip cigars? Make the fondue? Skinner had never known the German people to be much concerned with sharks or aquatic life of any form, unless one counts a stash of porn aboard a submarine. And he’d never once known a shark to eat sauerkraut. QED, as far as he was concerned.

  “The head Nazi researcher for the project, or Researchmeister,” James Brolin narrated, “engineered the sharks on a genetic level to detect and destroy so-called ‘polluted’ human blood. At their fin-tips a variety of weapons. Teeth, lasers, even a metal exoskeleton capable of withstanding…”

  The good PhD kicked his dog in the face then took to his letter desk to vent his fury by pen. He furiously wrote the phoney behind the documentary, one John Maynard Beans, of his displeasure. When Bartholomew Skinner watched the History Channel, he wanted in-depth coverage of Alaskan pawn shops, staged forays into deep-swamp bridal preparations, and, of course, unwarranted doomsday speculations. He did not want completely unresearched tripe about the Nazis masquerading as poorly researched tripe about the Nazis.

  “Alice!” he shouted, even though his wife’s name was ‘Dierdre.’ “My pen!”

  “Dear John Maynard Beans,” he wrote out.

  “As a long-time and respected historian of 20th century Germany, I would just like to say regarding your recent documentary, The Nazi’s Secret Shark Research Unveiled, that there is no such thing as Nazi sharks. That’s stupid.

  Sincerely,

  Professor Bartholomew Skinner”

  The documentary had gotten so much attention from the invalids who are still forced to watch the History Channel that Professor Skinner’s letter was readily picked up as an op-ed. He felt he had settled the matter with his Rousseauian wit. Not so. One morning, as he drank the thick coffee he called ‘Arabic Mud’, which tasted not unlike an outhouse smells, he was incensed to read an actual rebuttal.

  “Dear Prof. Skinner,” the shameless charlatan wrote.

  “I appreciate you writing to me and I am honored you have seen my documentary. I have considered your letter, your credentials, and your reputation with great care and would just like to say, in response, that it is you who are stupid.

  All the best,

  Doctor John Maynard Beans, PhD”

  This time he took to his keyboard to type out his fury, imagining each key one of Beans’s teeth—small, yellow, and made in China.

  “Dear Beans,

  I would just like to point out a major, but easily neglected fact that you seem to have missed in your research. Namely, that you are a Neandertwat and possibly even a Cro-Magdouche. Moreover, there are no Nazi sharks.

  Sincerely,

  Bartholomew Skinner, PhD, LD”

  Skinner tried to move on with his life, but found himself reading and re-reading Beans’s statement. He tried burning it, but as soon as he did, he had to buy another copy just to be angry at it. Each day, he bought the paper, reading the headlines he cared nothing about, pretending to himself, and to confused neighbourhood children, that he wasn’t looking for Beans’s inevitable response. It took three whole days of misery, during which time he had consumed his bodyweight in Hagen Daaz, before the response at last arrived.

  “Dear Bart,” came the terse and impudent reply.

  “Couldn’t help noticing you teach high school.

  Regards,

  John Maynard Beans PhD

  P.S. There are.”

  The keyboard!

  “Dear Johnny Boy,

  Don’t only self-taught charlatans write for the History Channel?

  Kind regards,

  B. Skinner

  P.S. There are not.”

  Skinner called up his ex-wife that night just to call her a slut. Also, had she seen last night’s episode of Supernatural? He’d missed it. Beans got back to him the next day.

  “B.S.,

  Would just like to reiterate an earlier point in the discussion, to wit, your stupidity.

  Best,

  John Maynard Beans

  P.S. Are.”

  Before this exchange could become even more asinine, the world of daytime television gracefully intervened. And the world paid attention. Or at least the small, unemployed percentage of the world that watches daytime television. Before another flaccid line of prose could be exchanged, the dignified scholars found themselves before the audience of The Malik Bloom Show.

  The aforementioned Malik sat on a white leather chair between the antagonists. They faced one another, from either side of him, like vengeful catfish in three-piece suits. Their vibes of repressed white-guy anger sizzled against Malik’s soul, almost undoing the colonic he’d had yesterday.

  “We got a great show this morning,” Bloom stood and announced to his audience, “because we have the two scholars at the center of the most debated issue of our time. Did Hitler make a bunch of nasty ol’ sharks to get up in our biz?”

  Bloom did a pointless dance to distract the audience. Perhaps there was a teleprompter malfunction. Or perhaps he just needed to do a dance at the moment. Malik was an enigma wrapped in a mystery trying to forget an embarrassing past as a child sitcom star. He went on, at any rate.

  “Doctor John Maynard Beans studied ecology at the University of Berlin and was one of the original forty-five members of the Buttehoet Expedition that tried to bring barstools to Arctic penguins. As one of the forty-seven survivors, he returned to America, disillusioned. He studied European history in India, because a swami owed him a lot of money. With several groundbreaking documentaries in the past ten years, including Satanic Pasta, Elizabeth: True Inventor of the Sandwich, and now The Nazi’s Secret Shark Research Unveiled, he has become the most prominent American historian alive.”

  The audience applauded and hoped for another dance. Boy did they get one!

  “And Professor Bartholomew Skinner got his BA in mycology from the University of Maryland. Growing weary of mushrooms and their inability to commit, he studied German history at the Sorbonne. He returned to America and wrote the bestseller, Spores of Hitler: Ideology as a Bulbous Fungoid.”

  The audience applauded again. Their need was palpable; Bloom had them where he wanted them. He delivered the dance—a modified Irish jig with soul, if you must know—and they cheered.

  “So, Doctor Beans first,” Bloom began, “are there really Nazi sharks and why weren’t they in Saving Private Ryan?”

  “Please,” Doctor Beans demurred, “call me Doctor Beans. We have documents by Nazi scientists. We have authenticated the hell out of these documents, if I may put it politely. And the conclusion is this: they freaking did it! They made attempts to reprogram the brains of the sharks, as well as modify their bodies. And there is sug
gestion that they had real succ—”

  “If I may just interrupt,” Skinner interrupted.

  “You just did,” Beans noted, his blue cravat puffing out with contempt.

  “I would like to point out,” Skinner continued, “that documents are not proof. Nazis are a-holes. This is a fact. They could just be lying. Beans, too, is an a-hole and so could just be lying.”

  “Are you accusing me of forging documents?” Beans inquired indignantly.

  “I wasn’t, but that’s a good point.”

  “And the footage in the documentary?”

  “Faker than her heaving and highly distracting bosoms!” Skinner exclaimed, his dry, white finger pointing like death’s claw toward the audience. Malik’s gaze followed the prophetic finger toward the blonde in the audience, whose top struggled like a mongoose to contain the erupting boobage. Malik nodded and supposed, yes, even beautiful and extremely attractive things—as that bimbo’s magnificent rack, what are those? E-cups?—can indeed be all illusion.

  “But surely you must admit such a fake has value?” Malik inquired, freshly inspired. “Perhaps the footage is fake, but there is still truth and hours of enjoyment beneath?”

  The bimbo smiled and nodded. Malik knew he’d be getting laid that afternoon.

  “Then what of the surviving sharks?” Beans asked.

  “If you had surviving sharks,” Skinner argued with a scoff, “they would have been featured in the documentary.”

  At this, Beans stood up, adjusted his cravat like an evil hypnotist and raised his head in arrogant wisdom. Either he was about to transcend this plain of existence, or he had something to announce.