Nazi Sharks! Read online

  “We’ve seen your moves, baby,” Sherry went on, looking Edwina up and down like a slimy granola bar, “and you might as well have sucked them with a bright, yellow straw from Esther William’s rotting asshole! The only Williams we care about is Wendy O. Isn’t that right, girls?”

  “Yeah!” the girls gang-shouted.

  “Maybe that’s why you swim like an epileptic seal with a meth habit,” Steph shouted, coming forward, her camel-toe clenching angrily beneath her pink one-piece.

  “Come on, girls,” Edwina demurred, “they swim good enough. Sure. But ‘good enough’ never cut it for us. We don’t need gimmicks and punk rock; we have skill.”

  “We’ll see about that in the finals,” Sherry answered. “It’s not like these Chinks stand a chance.”

  The Hello Kitties had giggled through treacherous bluffs of seaweed toward the stage, approaching at Costner’s beckoning with one hairy ape arm.

  “Alright girls!” Costner shouted, ripping himself from his reveries (which the OED defines as ‘really, really dirty day dreams,’). “Welcome to the semi-finals of the Kevin Costner Free-Form Synchronized Swimming Competition! I’m your generous host, Kevin Costner. And for these last few rounds, helping me judge your…performances will be my son—who kept his mother’s name, and maybe more, Burt Reynolds.”

  With a disgusted and contemptuous, but totally masculine eye, Costner regarded his son’s lack of ogling the tits and ass. The young, Hispanic man rose from an old lawn chair his dad had once found tangled in a fishing net and had unreasonably believed to have belonged to Sean Connery on the set of Octopussy. Reynolds was shrimpy in build, and short in stature, but handsome, with shy, dark dimples like an angel’s buttocks and sympathetic eyes, eyes that seemed to have seen many puppies die and actually cared.

  “Burt Reynolds, eh?” Steph muttered.

  “More like Debbie,” Andrea answered, making the Queens giggle and jiggle.

  “Hey, he’s kinda cute,” Edwina argued. “Like a cartoon fox.”

  Edwina had first discovered sexual attraction watching Disney’s Robin Hood and that sexy fox mutant had always been her first love. Her teenage years had been virginal because of it. What man’s flat face could match that prehensile muzzle, with the sly grin and the earnest eyes? She’d learned a little more about canine anatomy later in life and had given up on the idea—at least until Russian scientists can manage a decent hybrid. Here, in the person of Burt Reynolds, was the closest she’d ever come to that first flush of sexual passion.

  “Hey, you really got the hots for Shrimpy Gonzalez there, don’tcha?” Mila asked.

  Edwina could scarcely take her eyes off him. She was luxuriating in his Disney-esque appeal. And who could blame her?

  “Since the Slippery Esthers have not showed up,” Costner announced, “that means there are only four teams left. First up, the Hello Kitties, all the way from Tokyo!”

  The giggling cluster didn’t bother correcting that they’re actually from Connecticut. Giggling is, after all, a full-time job for attractive, Asian girls. Still, they did rush shyly toward the ocean and began their swim routine in earnest. For some spectators, this routine was an elaborate pantomime of Japan’s struggles to free itself from its Feudal history and emerge into modernity as a leader of technological innovation, not unlike how a Japanese caterpillar emerges from a Japanese cocoon into a Japanese stir-fry. To others, the routine was a playful mockery of Japanese tentacle porn, in which generously-endowed schoolgirls are forever forced to be ninjas and/or demonic sperm receptacles. But to most, it was some mediocre swimming and splashing in vaguely circular shapes as the girls struggled desperately not to drown or kick each other in the face.

  When this slice of beach-born performance art had reached the flourish of dangerous and inept water-kicking that was its conclusion, the girls returned to the shore giggling. One of the girls had, naturally, lost her bikini top. For this alone, Costner applauded with the fury of a thousand Viagras.

  “Nice touch!” he called out, assuming it was the true climax of the routine. “Domo arigato!”

  Noticing her exposed sashimis, the Kitty covered herself with giggling arms. The Kitties giggled their way back to their place on the beach to warm, dry, and contemplate what they’d read in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness last night.

  Costner nodded approvingly, until he noticed the disinterested state of his son, totally not-perving things up. He wasn’t ogling, staring, eyeing—not even peeping! When he was his son’s age, Costner would have mentally stacked those Asian bimbos like loaves of cornbread, propped a stepladder against their thighs, and pounded their funholes, one-by-one, up-and-down, a dozen times each, and not one of them would have left his gaze unimpregnated. (Mentally.) Really, he would have just stared at their tits and asses until one or more of them slapped him. But his son! What was that ladyboy thinking about? His Scooby Doo lunchbox? His Transformers DVD set?

  With his mind back on the competition, Costner’s spirits returned and he called out, “Okay, the Pussy Willows, you’re up next!”

  Now the Pussy Willows were certainly not astrophysicists. But they weren’t entirely stupid. Taking a hint from the last routine, these bleached-blonde bimbos threw off their bikini tops like large, bra-shaped spiders, leaving their massive milkwagons loose in all their well-paid-for glory. A seagull, seeing this, crashed into a cliffside. A raccoon went home to screw his wife. An old janitor went home to screw his raccoon. A passing biplane became a straightplane, much to its parents’ approval. Costner’s jaw dropped.

  The Cherry Bombs crossed their arms over their red-and-black strategically-torn one-pieces, defiantly unimpressed by the spheroid objects and their vacuous possessors.

  “Seriously?” Mila said.

  “So what’s our next gimmick, Edwina?” Nikki asked.

  “I was thinking we can take up as roving gypsy psychics,” Andrea posed. Steph nodded approvingly.

  “I wonder if he’s good with bow and arrow?” Edwina wondered.

  The Willows went bouncing like a middle school round of dodgeball, laughing with bright, white teeth. Gingerly they plunged into the cold, ocean water, their nipples hardening like forgotten wads of gum, their bodies splashing with the grace of a drowning lemur.

  They were assured of their masterful strategy. And it might have worked, too. Sun Tzu missed this particular technique, although Chapter 7 of The Art of War does hint at it. But really, it’s the wisdom of Janiqua Robins from episode 484 of Maury.

  What the strategical bimbos hadn’t considered in their Art of Whore was the hideously mangled shreds of flesh and shattered bone that had been floating just behind a particularly mischievous mass of seaweed. As the bimbos splashed brainlessly toward their bland, but entirely topless climax, the seaweed shifted to the left, revealing the disgusting mass of shark-chew that had once been a human being.

  The bimbos shrieked for an absurdly long time without actually fleeing from the mass. Edwina could see their hands flailing in terror, but their enormous breasts hid the object of revulsion completely.

  “They can sure hold a note,” Steph stated.

  The shrieking, at last, subsided or at least rose to a pitch only dogs could hear. This coincided with the body’s skull, crushed like an old tube of toothpaste, brushing across the bottom of Millie’s breasts. With Millie leading the voluptuous pack, the Willows abandoned their stupor and came bounding out to the shore, water droplets flying furiously off their swaying, knocking bongos.

  The body came washing up behind them, a white and red mass deposited like a tampon that refuses to flush. The other teams blanched and retreated from the sullied shore, especially when it seemed to look at them. Ew, gross!

  Certainly such an incident wouldn’t disqualify any swim team of topless bimbos, since said bimbos certainly hadn’t chewed up the body. At least, that was not a working theory at the time. But the bimbos themselves had decided the competition wasn’t worth it. In the future, they’d only remove
their tops for upfront cash or liquor. In this way, they became ladies of principle. Also, the competition was, needless to say, off.

  As for that devious seaweed, it retreated behind a rock just off the cliffside, its fiendish work complete. For today.

  Chapter 11

  Theories, Facts, and Guts

  “That there’s a sternum!” the medical examiner declared, pointing at the twisted segment of bone fragments, marrow, and ground meat with his clipboard.

  “Then what’s this?” Warren asked, stroking the stubble on his thin, ratty face. For some reason his stubble always felt strangely soft, like a feather duster, making it somewhat pleasurable to stroke. Given the gruesome sight before him, a body that resembled a clown’s scrotum more than anything human, he needed it.

  The medical examiner nodded and began poking the nebulous, red-gray blob with his clipboard. (He couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually used the thing for writing on.)

  “That particularly unpleasant mass is a pureed series of fragments that had once been a pancreas, a femur, and some semi-digested nachos,” the examiner explained proudly, ignoring the pipe smoke Sheriff Babbage was breathing into his face.

  “So?” Warren asked.

  “Well, having taken a good look at this here honk of chewed-up whatsit, I can safely reckon it’s not the work of any serial killer.”

  The Sheriff shook his ancient head with geriatric indignation. Clearly another rant was a-brewin’.

  “Reckoning’s for gods and upper-class sluts with their key parties and pool boys,” the sheriff derided. “You and me just do the factoring. Fact man, myself. Is that there a shark’s doing or isn’t it?”

  The examiner cleared his throat, drew the clipboard comfortingly close to his body, and used all his willpower to ignore the insult. An insult he didn’t quite comprehend. But nonetheless.

  “I’m gonna say ‘yes,’” the examiner answered. “These wounds have what I’d call a ‘toothy quality,’ and a ‘bite-centric pattern’—I’m factoring.”

  The sheriff lowered his pipe with indignation, his face slack as a dead nun’s rectum. “Reckoning’s a lot of things,” he declared. “Hunching’s a lot of things. Factoring’s just one thing—and you sure as hell ain’t doing it. Examine the dang body, already, and give us some facts!”

  Warren slapped the slab so hard a blob of lung fell off a sliced eye left between two startlingly intact toes. “Here’s an interesting fact for you, Sheriff,” he shouted, “Nazi sharks. Goddamn Nazi sharks!”

  The medical examiner could think of nothing to point to with his clipboard, so he remained aghast. The sheriff eyed the agent inquisitively, his frosty eyebrows, considering the federal weasel like a man playing poker with a car bomb.

  “Killed a few Nazis in my day,” the sheriff admitted. “Killed a few sharks, too. Nazi blood and shark blood ain’t much different, just as cold and just as smelly. I give you that. But in all my years—and there are a few of them—I ain’t never heard tell of a Nazi shark.”

  “It’s been the subject of public debate, if you could call it that,” Warren explained. “A few cranks got into it, but there’s some actual evidence to back it up, presented in an entertaining and informative History Channel documentary. We look into these things. Fascinating stuff. Right, Walker?”

  Walker had been deep in his staring contest with the newly-revealed sliced eye, but relented. Toe-eye wins again!

  “I guess,” he said. “But what does it matter? Isn’t all of life like a shark? Just eating and eating and eating until there’s nothing left at all but crap?”

  The eye reclaimed his attention once more. It somehow seemed more real than anything else he’d encountered that day. Unless you count the egg salad sandwich he’d had earlier. It was much tastier than it had any right to be.

  “Exactly,” Warren agreed. “And most fascinating of all, sheriff? They found the sharks. Hitler-made with the best German engineering and Nationalistic assholery. Nazi sharks. En route to America they escaped. According to Coast Guard officials, the ship went down just a few dozen miles from the shores of Shakatitt Beach. Here’s what I’ve been thinking—”

  “Could be Nazi sharks,” the sheriff answered, much to everyone’s astonishment. The medical examiner even pointed the clipboard to his astonished face. “Could be gremlins,” the sheriff went on. “Could be a lawn mower in the wrong place at the wrong time. Facts, Agent Warren! Facts’ll fetch your slippers and mix you a drink, not the cheap stuff either. Theories and thinkings’ll cheat on you with your best friend, even though the man lost his legs and one testicle in the war—the plumbin’ still works, mind.”

  Warren slammed his fist down with indignation. As this obsolete Sheriff ground his way through a series of Baconian criteria on factual analysis, moving slower than a woolly mammoth with the most aggressively unpleasant haemorrhoids, girls were dying. Girls who once had lives, hopes, dreams, and bodacious tatas, long willowy legs, plump, pretty lips that looked incredible around that lollipop they’d be sucking while in their sexed-out sailor suits.

  “Dammit, Sheriff!” Warren shouted. “You can’t live your life waiting for facts to come up and hump your leg! You gotta go out there, take the risk, hump the facts out of reality yourself—not like a creepy jogging-trail rapist, but like Wilt Chamberlain, John Holmes, David Duchovny. And that’s what Walker and I are gonna do, with or without your help. I know an expert who might just be able to crack this case.”

  The sheriff’s eyes squinted into a grin, his old face tautly pulled against that stubborn, cob pipe. Warren and Walker followed the sheriff’s bemused gaze, hoping to find a dog in a bee costume. Warren’s furious fist had landed right in what used to be a stomach and an ear.

  Chapter 12

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

  The Commandant has been paying excessive attention to my wife lately. I knew I shouldn’t have married a woman for her holsteins. They attract lots of attention and sometimes nesting birds. Still, it is me she smothers with them every night until I pass out with bliss and loss of oxygen.

  It helps my research. As does the cocaine. I awake bursting with ideas and urine. I come to the lab and shout to the assistants, “The lasers must be in their eyes! How else can they aim them? They have no thumbs!” The assistants wonder why I do not just ask to give the sharks thumbs. Because that would just be stupid!

  When I ask them why the sharks can’t cook things with their minds yet, they tell me the sharks’ brains can scarcely handle chewing and swimming at once, let alone pyrokinetic activity. They then offer me a series of narcotics and hope I will leave them alone. But I will not.

  They have been injecting the embryonic fluid of the finest German whores into the sharks’ brains. The assistants say this has shown some effect on mentally ill children, particularly those with insatiable appetites for seals. I accused them of trying to make a brothel of sharks rather than an army of sharks, but I gave the approval anyway, because I actually like both ideas.

  Initially, the sharks displayed no great intelligence and would never kiss after coitus. This has changed. The developmental cells seem to have begun to work on the shark brains. They will now accept instructions, swim in formation, perform team-based tasks (so long as the tasks involve killing and eating hobos) and become distressed if I forget the oven on.

  “These are smart sharks, sure,” I told the assistants. “But can they solve a good crossword?”

  The assistants returned to their research in dismay. They still think I am a madman. But I am now a madman with results. A madman who knows a smart shark from a super-intelligent shark. A madman with all the peanut butter.

  Chapter 13

  Dangerous and Stupid

  The air smelled dangerous that night, Andrea thought. Dangerous and stupid. The perfect kind of night for staying in the hotel room, wearing nothing but oversized t-shirts and bikini bottoms, and eating some fried chick
en. It’s what hot girls do in hotel rooms. But Edwina was breaking that particular covenant. It’s not that Andrea was jealous. She herself only dated fruit vendors, and no-one’s going to delve into that particular bit of psychopathology. But she was worried.

  “I can’t believe you’re going out with that guy,” Mila said, emphasizing the ‘that guy’ more than Andrea would have agreed with. But Mila had always been a judgmental cunt. Sorry, she told herself, feeling guilty. Sometimes she worried Mila had telepathic powers, just like that scene in Scanners where the dude gives these old ladies a nosebleed. She touched her nose discretely. Dodged that bullet.

  “Why not?” Edwina asked, pulling up her plaid skirt. “The competition’s been cancelled now, so it’s all good.”

  “He’s an ethical man, that Kevin Costner,” Steph noted while rooting around through Edwina’s purse. That Steph. She was a goofball. She’d probably insert something embarrassing in the purse, like a picture of herself after she was arrested for arson.

  “But it’s not the competition,” Mila answered. “It’s—well—he’s named ‘Burt Reynolds.’” Cunt. “And you met him while vomiting. Feet away from a chewed-up torso. That’s not good. That’s the opposite of good.”

  “It’s true,” Nikki agreed. “I know my Feng Shui, and that’s bad chi.”

  Nikki agreed with almost everything Mila said. She’d bought Season 3 of Sliders because Mila had referenced it once. Season 3 was when it started to suck, although it had its moments. Nikki should start to be herself more, Andrea often thought. She had a deep, creative side, a side that could look at a porcelain clown and see a smaller porcelain clown with all the paint chipped off.

  “He passed me his handkerchief,” Edwina rebutted. “How many guys even have a handkerchief anymore? And of those, how many share them? Shows sensitivity. And he’s cute.”