Nazi Sharks! Read online

  “Reynolds?” she asked. “Are you in there?”

  All along he had been muttering beneath the mask, a tittering sound like an overactive insect orgy. Now he projected his litany against her intrusion.

  “Mighty Jaws, Great Shark God, Father of all Sharks! I, a useless, limp-dicked faerie come before you!”

  “Take off the mask! I know the real you is in there. The guy who brought me those gas station flowers. The guy who confessed his deepest feelings to me and called me ‘Deezen.’”

  “For my useless, pathetic, lady-boy presence, I apologize and beseech your strength!”

  “So, my friends’ stupid theory was right. You really are the Shakatitt Shark.”

  “Mighty Jaws, Source of Toothy Power and Jaw-ey Might—”

  “Mandibular would probably be—”

  Reynolds raised his voice over the interruption, raising the sacrificial knife high above his head. “O Mighty Jaws, accept this delicious, eminently fuckable sacrifice of splendid boobs and exquisite, biteable ass!”

  Edwina sighed. Perhaps it was the chloroform or her genetic shortage of adrenaline, but she found herself as much disappointed in Reynolds’s lack of humanity as scared for her life.

  “Why, Reynolds? Do you really see no middle ground between screwing women and killing us? Like, platonic coffee dates? Or New Age yoga instructor? You seem relatively flexible and I don’t even—”

  Reynolds groaned in exasperation and continued with his litany. Edwina gave him time to stop, being respectful of the beliefs of others and tolerant of different views. She hoped, once he was done, he’d give her a response in a true ecumenical spirit.

  “Sharks, most powerful creatures in the world, pure phallic strength, rulers of the sea, I wear my father’s underwear. Now share with me your potency. Make of my penis a fearsome shark: hard, fast, and unstoppable!”

  “I guess not,” Edwina muttered and turned away to a poster of Lamberto Bava’s Devilfish.

  Reynolds lowered the knife and his sharky head simultaneously, the cold, black eyes seemingly expressing regret and moral indecision.

  “Sorry, Deezen,” he addressed her at last. “But to unite myself with shark kind—it’s the only way to have that phallic power. The power of Grey Skull, Olympus, or maybe even Burt Reynolds. It’s what I’ve longed for my whole life and it’s all that’ll make my life whole.”

  “Have you tried Viagra? It’s nothing to be ashamed—”

  Reynolds shook his shark head as if to cast out all thoughts of empathy, humanity, and that last episode of Millionaire Matchmaker. He returned to his prayers, louder than ever, opening his arms in a display of vulnerability to the statue of Jaws that loomed behind Edwina. It was the first she’d noticed the massive, phallic object.

  “Taste the blood of this, my greatest sacrifice for you, Omnipotent Jaws!” he proclaimed. “Most beautiful and tantalizing sacrifice, she who most blasphemes against the phallus!”

  Edwina was loathe to admit she was somewhat flattered by being the most tantalizing of all sacrifices. She was also scared senseless, because Reynolds raised the sacrificial blade in a gleaming arch above his head. She squirmed against the makeshift bondage, hoping it would betray its Dollar Tree origins, but it did not.

  “I can’t,” he said at last and lowered the blade again with a sigh.

  Edwina whimpered with unexpected relief and her eyes welled with gratitude. What would come next, she didn’t think of—she just wanted to get out, go home, and study to become an astronaut. (Space tourism would be big soon.)

  Reynolds took off the shark mask, his sweat-soaked black hair falling against his glistening face. His eyes expressed regret and internal torment. So did his mouth, actually.

  “You’re special, the most amazing women I’ve ever met,” he told her. “You don’t deserve to be bitten like the others. I’ll bite you before I sacrifice you. Perhaps Jaws will deem me a pussy in His Mighty Black Eyes, but perhaps He will understand this is intended as an act of Power and Courage.”

  Reynolds crawled toward Edwina’s duct-taped thighs, his sweaty balls flopping easily out of the gross, droopy briefs and resting on the band like roosting Cornish hens. Without warning other than a sudden, unsharklike snarl, he launched his teeth into the soft, white flesh of Edwina’s shapely thigh as though it were a Thanksgiving turkey smothered in salsa.

  Edwina gasped with pain, but saw her opportunity. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s tits and ass. She seized his head between her powerful swimmer’s thighs and squeezed as much as the duct tape and string would permit. Reynolds struggled to pull free and slapped against her knees, but his slaps were pathetic and girlish, as his father no doubt would have informed him. In the struggle, the duct tape began to loosen and the string proved no match for the infuriated woman.

  The sweat-soaked, greasy head had extricated itself from the sexy trap in which it had found itself, but Edwina kicked him away like a filthy sombrero. He crashed against a shelf of shark memorabilia, causing porcelain sharks to smash against his head. The statue of Mighty Jaws gazed on with calloused amusement at the failure of his discipline—even Jaws thought he was a pussy.

  Edwina pushed the statue of Jaws off its Sacred Pedestal of two round, testicular boulders. With a grating growl of collapsing weight, it fell onto Reynolds, who responded with a ball-shattering “Oomph!” He was crying as he used his minute biceps to push the shark off. This was her chance. Still weak from the chloroform, Edwina staggered toward the cave entrance, gradually leaving the hidey-hole and her psychotic suitor behind her.

  From the boardwalk, Warren spotted the white, moonlit figure fleeing from an inconspicuous crevice in the rocks. The figure, now clearly a naked woman, ran like a drunken gazelle through the frothy surf. Behind her, a darker, less-human figure emerged from the crevice. With his binoculars, Walker observed the new object: it was a thin, brown man with a papier-mache shark head over his own and an enormous, novelty blade, obtainable from any nerdshop, raised threateningly over his goofy head. More telling was the diabolically saggy excuse for underwear that clung to his sweating buttocks like a touch of leprosy.

  “Either my eyes are less reliable than a pie-dough enema,” Warren told Walker, “or we’ve just caught the Shakatitt Shark red-handed.”

  “His hands aren’t red yet,” Walker noted. “Should we wait?”

  “He’s wearing a shark head and an all-too familiar pair of hideously stained briefs. So, no. Let’s not.”

  While they discussed the pros and cons of doing their job properly, Edwina continued her shrieking, wobbling flight through the surf, her breasts bouncing like Olympian volleyballs in the moonlight. Reynolds was easily catching up to her, his bloodlust overriding all admiration for her divine white buttocks at their finest moment.

  The knife raised above his head as Reynolds was at last in striking distance. He would redeem himself before Jaws.

  Edwina felt his presence profanely near. She made the fatal mistake of glancing behind her, as all fleeing women must do, and instantly tripped over a strand of seaweed that had been carelessly left in her path by the sea.

  “I penetrate you in the name of Jaws,” “Prepare for the ultimate penetration,” and “Here I come!” were all lines Reynolds had thought of saying at this moment, but instead went with a rage-fuelled bellow. He began to bring the knife down to the provocative female flesh.

  Edwina closed her eyes and readied herself for the end. She was out of ideas. She cursed seaweed with all her heart. Then she wondered why she wasn’t dead yet. She opened her eyes in time to see the fearsome hands holding the fearsome knife bring it impotently down against her hip, where it and the hands fell motionless. That was when she realized they were no longer attached to a body. The high-pitched screams she had been hearing she had assumed to be her own, but she wasn’t screaming anymore. No, they were coming from her would-be slayer, Burt Reynolds.

  “Jaws! Mighty Jaws! I sacrificed so much for you!” he screamed, batting
at the shark’s mouth with his profusely squirting stumps. The shark’s jaws squished his shoulders together until his breastbone cracked and sliced through his flesh like a wishbone.

  The shark thrashed furiously over the beach during its midnight snack, hooked as it was on an ill-placed strand of seaweed. Reynolds’s head flailing like a goat’s testicle in the shark’s mouth, crushing his vertebrae and what little use remained in his spine. Edwina watched the scene with a profound sense of emptiness and horror. She hadn’t felt so helpless since they cancelled Firefly. She hadn’t even noticed the other sharks swimming up behind her and surrounding her like the last veal cutlet at a buffet.

  “You sharks are assholes!” Reynolds cried with his dying breath, and at last gave himself up to his true destiny: shark feces. The shark crunched and swallowed the slight man before the eyes of the approaching FBI agents.

  Warren and Walker at last made it to the scene, as Warren made a mental note to hit the gym and invent some kind of “sand shoes.” Without hesitation, he and Walker drew their FBI-issued handguns and unleashed the lead-pocalypse on the Nazi sharks. Cold, stinking blood gushed from the abominations’ Teutonically-hardened hides. Edwina clutched her ears and shrieked from the depths of her vulva.

  The sharks began retreating to the sea, feeling unwanted and unappreciated on shore. One of the fleeing sharks broke the surface, opened its mouth with an unearthly, metallic roar, and began firing an array of nasty, German bullets from the back of its mouth. One bullet hit Warren in the shoulder, sending him down to appreciate that sand-drawing he’d missed earlier.

  Walker instinctively leapt at Edwina to keep the very naked girl from injury during the non-sequitur assault. It was probably the best jump-duck-for-cover he’d ever performed, he noted. He’d never felt more alive—not that the standards are high for Walker. Also, it involved a naked girl.

  “What in Tar Nation was that?” Warren exclaimed, clutching his wounded arm, once the shark had returned to its murky depths.

  “Nazi shark automatic assault turrets,” Walker grunted. “Figures.”

  Chapter 29

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

  Hitler has decided to pull the plug on my research, suspecting it was all an elaborate April Fools prank. I informed him that the month of April was still some time off. That was when he wondered why he wasn’t currently riding a shark. Why could a shark not answer his phone and provide directions to the nearest gas station? And speaking of gas, why are his gas chambers not shark chambers? Why is he wasting his time conquering Europe now, moreover, when he’ll only have to reconquer it with sharks later?

  I could not answer any of these questions, largely because they had no grounding in reality. But then, I supposed that was my own fault. I had set the bar too high, and the Fuhrer had taken that bar and hurtled it somewhere near Jupiter.

  The unfinished, patchwork sharks I ordered into a storage tank that would retain a consistent supply of fresh water from the ocean, a virtually endless supply of food, and a steady stream of angry pornography.

  Some of the sharks had lasers, some had titanium jaws, some had mouth turrets, but not one could read a Tarot card to save its life. They were a lethal, killing force, yes, but an uneven one. This would annoy any obsessive compulsive before they killed him.

  Hitler had become as paranoid as he was irrational by this point, and feared I would plant sharks in his morning coffee. I protested the thought had never occurred to me, not just because of my loyalty, but because it was an extremely absurd notion. For once—and this showed the Fuhrer’s weakening condition—he deigned to explain his thinking to me.

  “Clearly, Researchmeister, you have not spent these months stealing peanut butter and smearing it over your wife’s bonanzas,” he stated. “Yet you have nothing to show for it but highly-intelligent sharks with the occasional eye-laser. So you have been developing the sharks in other directions. More arcane directions. Ghostly directions. In a pact with Pazuzu, Demon Lord of the Frigid Hells, you have given the sharks spiritual dominion over German liquids. They could be in my coffee, my spittle, the tears I spill over Murnau’s magnificent Sunrise. Therefore, please ensure they explode upon hearing the Anthem.”

  I tried to convince the Fuhrer that Pazuzu had never set foot in my lab and I had, in fact, been astonishingly busy with the peanut butter. But it was to no avail. My final act as Researchmeister has been to grant my woman-hating, semi-robotic shark children an Achilles heel and a massive bucket of cheese curds.

  Farewell, my finned friends.

  Chapter 30

  Refried Beans

  “Your friend’s a hero,” Warren addressed the Bubblegum Queens, fumbling with the bandage over his wounded shoulder while receiving his fifth tetanus booster. “A very shapely hero. Stopped the Shakatitt Shark and did it topless. As it should be.”

  He and Walker were filling out reports, making hushed phone calls, at least one of which was merely an order for a medium pepperoni, and seemingly waiting for something. Or someone.

  Edwina sat shivering in her second police-issue blanket—she was starting a collection—and the much superior blanket of her friends’ love and compassion.

  “Wow,” Steph exclaimed. “That’s sexy and impressive. Great work, Eddie!”

  “We don’t know what we would have done if something happened to you,” Nikki said. “Probably just go back to school and do something useful with our lives. Where’s the fun in that?”

  The Queens nodded with agreement. A most heinous fate without their dear Edwina.

  “He was a great guy,” Edwina answered, staring at a Q-Tip dropped beside the waste paper basket, “except for being an impotent, shark-worshiping serial killer…”

  “We’ve all been there, Eddie,” Nikki consoled.

  Andrea suddenly gasped, her fingers darting up to her temples as she would normally only do during Johnny Depp films. Either that laxative kicked in, or she was getting another vague premonition.

  “Something douchey this way comes,” she announced prophetically, her eyes closed with inner sight.

  “What?” Nikki asked.

  As she did, a police receptionist burst dramatically through the double-doors to the precinct’s main office, her eyes bulging with excitement or a profound intestinal cramp. What could possibly be happening in the quiet town of Shakatitt Beach now? Just how many Red Bulls had she downed? These questions occurred to the observers.

  “Hey guys!” she shouted. “He’s here! The world-renowned historian, John Maynard Beans!”

  She moved out of the way permitting the swaggering entrance of the master scholar, Beans, clad in his finest three-piece, cravat, and shoulder-magnifying overcoat. He tapped his walking stick dandily as he entered and spared no time with formalities. He was here on a mission. A mission of science, history, and really good publicity.

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” he addressed, covering all genders efficiently, “what you have in the delightful honeypot that is Shakatitt Beach is a Winnie the Pooh, so to speak, who has decided to make it his base of operations—but this Winnie the Pooh is an angry, racist, intolerant Pooh, equipped with automatic assault turrets, night vision, lasers, explosives of varying force, titanium skeletal reinforcements, and pneumatic jaws. Worse, this Pooh is not a bear at all, but a bunch of sharks! Sharks engineered by that big meanie, Hitler. And these sharks believe in two things: eating everything, and the Third Reich. Until we’re all speaking German and smelling like bratwurst, they will spread over the whole coast, killing everything in their wake like we were a defenceless seal pup named Yusef. Understand?”

  Nikki raised her hand tentatively.

  “Yes?” Beans asked.

  “What does this have to do with Winnie the Pooh?” she inquired.

  “It has nothing to do with Winnie the Pooh. I was merely pointing out that Winnie the Pooh likes honey as much as the sharks invaded this beach with a
genocidal killing spree.”

  Walker nodded in a show of sudden understand, which he shared with Nikki, “It’s a metaphor.”

  “A really bad one,” Steph noted.

  “Ohhh,” Nikki comprehended.

  “Any other questions?” Beans asked. He couldn’t imagine how further clarification could be required, but he dared not underestimate human stupidity.

  Andrea raised her hand and waited for Beans to point to her.

  “Winnie the Pooh once became so fat from eating honey that he got stuck in a tree hole, where he remained until Rabbit smeared him with butter,” she stated. “Is there any chance of applying this solution to the shark situation?”

  Andrea looked around proudly at the others, who all nodded their appreciation.

  “No, no, no,” Beans responded. “Listen, Winnie the Pooh has nothing to do with it. It was a metaphor. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Just forget it.”

  “Then how do we stop the sharks?” Andrea pressed.

  “Yeah!” Nikki agreed.

  “I’m glad you asked. It so happens that during my latest excursion into the Nazi Researchmeister’s files, I stumbled upon some additional documents on the Nazi shark program. I hadn’t noticed them at first, as they had been stuck to the bottom of some lewd, German pornography. But while getting a microwaveable snack of fish sticks along with my delicious, homemade tartar sauce, I spotted it.”

  “So the sharks are weak to tartar sauce…” Steph concluded.

  “No, the sauce has nothing to do with it. That was just incidental to the discovery. Setting the stage. I’m getting to what I discovered.”

  “Would you say the sharks are just dying for your secret tartar sauce recipe,” Nikki asked, “or is that too merely a metaphor?”

  “Just forget the sauce altogether, please! I was explaining how I came to discover—”

  “I don’t understand,” Steph interrupted.