Nazi Sharks! Read online

  “Well, the kaboom is getting closer,” Susan noted.

  “To the shore!” Betty shrieked. “And quickly!”

  The girls swam frantically toward the shore, again, with a lot more enthusiasm than any real ability. An E for Effort, but to no avail.

  Initially it felt to Florence like a mustache brushing against her leg, and she imagined one of those highly-amusing pairs of Groucho glasses. Alas, the mustachey brushing swiftly became a sharky biting across her pelvis. The jaws crushed and ground the delicate, female bones, rending and devouring her whole reproductive system in a single, horrific bite. As the shark pulled away, an ovary hung out the side of its mouth. Florence’s slender, award-winning legs floated to the surface as she herself never could quite manage. Her torso sank swiftly beneath the surface to feed another shark. Before her dying plunge, she only had time to say, “Swim, Susan, I’ll distract them.”

  But Susan felt herself suddenly straddling a hard, throbbing mass of muscle, like King Kong’s penis. She remembered playing this game with mom’s eighth and twelfth boyfriends. Soon the game became all too serious as the SS armband flashed into her vision, memories of studying Anne Frank in high school flooding her brain. The phallic beast’s prehensile face met hers in a stunningly acrobatic move that no normal shark could manage and her torso suddenly seared with outrageous agony. Then, as her spinal cord was brutally nibbled into breadcrumbs, she felt nothing but the onset of death.

  “I love you guys,” she blubbered with her dying breath as her head sunk beneath a red, frothing sea, where her own left breast and Florence’s gorgeously-sculpted legs floated before her fading vision. “I’m glad—” glub “—my last mome” —glub— “nts were with you!”

  Tracy shrieked in horror and dismay. She looked back to see Susan not sinking, but devoured with one hungry chomp. If the methodical, super-organized attack alone didn’t give it away, the armbands and soulless eyes did: these were Nazi sharks!

  “This is what we get for global warming,” Tracy exclaimed in well-intentioned panic.

  Her contrition did nothing to save her arm from the thousands of kilograms of pressure and the millions of kilograms of hatred in the Nazi shark’s bite. With one arm missing and cystic fibrosis, Tracy strove toward shore with no more hope than a fat girl at a frat party. Blood streamed behind her in circular puddles as she progressed sporadically, the salt water tripling the agony.

  Shore seemed close to Tracy, whether it really was or not. But her courage swiftly dissipated as she observed Louisa pulled apart by two sharks, her kind, decent innards spilled into the sea like leftover spaghetti sauce.

  “Louisa,” she exclaimed, “you were one of the most wonderful people—Ahh!”

  The pain of her arm vanished as a new, significantly worse pain overtook her brain. The jaws of evil had grasped onto her right leg and began squeezing slowly, not a chomp, but a leisurely bite. The damn shark was savoring her! It was savoring her!

  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

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

  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

  Shark Weak

  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

  Making Sense of that Last Chapter

  “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

  Of Bimbos and Perverts

  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.

  The huddles began to break, first the Hello Kitties into a mass of giggling Asian girls that Costner decided he would violate with tentacles of tongue and penis. The Pussy Willows followed, grouping into a sort of bleached-blond jellyfish with implants, reminding Costner of a steaming pile of creamed corn with multiple vaginas.

  The Cherry Bombs broke next to strut across the unusually sexy battlefield to their arch-rivals, the Bubblegum Queens. Sand castles were trampled beneath their angry, punk feet. What you gonna do about it?

  Sherry adjusted her tits insolently and declared to her foes, “I hope you skanks are ready to suck my seaweed, ‘cause we got stuff you never even dreamed of.”

  The Cherry Bombs grinned grins that had consumed no small portion of feces, crossed their arms, and nodded their agreement in this provocation.

  Edwina smirked, too superior to be goaded by empty taunts and also remembering an amusing scene from Seinfeld.

  “Well,” she answered, “when body hair and cellulite count as a swim routine, we’ll gladly concede.”

  Somewhere in the spiritual realm, into which no living mind may penetrate, Oscar Wilde approved. A most witty retort.

  Sherry called out over her shoulder to the Cherry Bombs, without taking her eyes off the slick, cookie-cutter beauty of Edwina, “Oh, the Bubblegum Queens are getting bitchy. I don’t think Ward would approve.” The Cherry Bombs laughed, but only one of them actually got the reference.