Nazi Sharks!

by Jared Roberts

  “They’ll show,” Edwina affirmed.

  Was it just over a Spic calling himself Burt Reynolds, she wondered contemptuously, or—no, this was a point of honor. We cannot let our men by stolen willy-nilly, even creepy Hispanic men with no visible means of income. Really, her resentment went deeper, to Edwina’s ongoing talent for dragging the girl-gang from one fad to another. If it wasn’t 1950s synchronized swimming, it was a 1970s delinquent gang, a 1990s goth troupe, or that weird bee costume fad—what was that about, anyway? Ultimately, she thought, Edwina just watched too many movies and was way too impressionable. Nikki knew this, but how did she end up in the bee costume? And would she end up in a shark? These questions remained relevant to her.

  Andrea kicked a little dune that had once been a proud sand castle, in which a noble sand king once reigned.

  “That was such an AIDS-ridden, douche-washy thing to do!” she spat.

  “No kidding,” Mila agreed, casting her glances over the beach, shielding her eyes. There was no sign of the Cherry Bombs. It was just like them to be late. Skank Standard Time is always an hour behind.

  “Thanks, guys!” Edwina said. “I know it’s risky with that shark around and I just want you to know how much this means to me.”

  Nikka felt her resistance crumble. She knew Edwina felt every word of that sentence—not just in her throat, but in her heart. She cast her arms around her troublesome friend and held her tight.

  “Hey, death by shark-devouring before dishonor by slut,” Steph proclaimed, joining in on the increasingly sexy hug. “It’s too convoluted to be our motto, but it’s how I feel.”

  Mila and Andrea joined in, making the group hug complete and impressively arousing. Kevin Costner trained his binoculars on the delectable sight of compressed girl-flesh and mentally filed it away for later, just behind the mental bestiality folder.

  “What would I do without you guys?” Edwina gushed.

  “You dykes already at it?” Sherry asked. Where the hell had she come from?

  The Cherry Bombs were standing right behind the sexy group hug, hands on their hips. With their black-and-red two-piece bikinis and fin-shaped mohawks, they were ready for action.

  “Here’s an idea,” Edwina answered. “You can suck the turds out of a squirrel’s asshole—or you can shut our mouth and start swimming.”

  Sherry snorted with derision. She’d been told worse things by better people. Why’d she keep emailing the cardinal anyway?

  “So who’s the judge?” Sherry asked.

  “I am!” Costner answered, from directly behind her, the sunscreen on his nose only enhancing his pervert’s smile.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Nevermind that,” he answered. “Same rules as the main competition. I do not judge you based on your tits or your asses—not professionally, anyway. I judge based upon grace of execution, harmony of the team, and innovation of the moves. Not, I repeat, tits and ass.”

  Sherry and Edwina exchanged skeptical glances, the first and last time they’d ever be on the same wavelength. All the girls crossed their arms and Costner imagined what it must feel like to be those forearms.

  “Uh-huh,” Edwina answered.

  “Both teams swim at once,” Costner stated. “Everyone ready?”

  “We’re readier than your wife’s greasy tortilla-hole on fiesta night,” Sherry snapped and drew her team to the water’s edge.

  “We’re ready,” Edwina agreed.

  “Go!” Costner shouted.

  Edwina led her Queens into the water for the dramatic showdown. Yet, her mind was preoccupied. What were the twenty-eight flavors of Dr. Pepper? And she wondered if Reynolds would show up. Had he stayed up all night filling Sherry with his slimy queso? “That could’ve been me!” Edwina did not think. She felt it, but really she was angry. And violence isn’t the answer to anger; a fist will never give you back your superiority (unless it’s really well aimed), but skilful competition and honorable victory will.

  When Nikki was a little girl, she’d ride a pig named Mister Bertrand. Her mom even made her a tiny, pink saddle for the Bertrand Rides. Whenever Mister Bertrand would crash into a pile of filthy, stinking mud, so would Nikki. Being there, with their finals routine readied for an audience of perverts and sharks, she felt she was back on that saddle in some sense—and she couldn’t be happier.

  The Bubblegum Queens reached their positions and immediately began their elegant strokes, first circling with the geometric perfection of Aunt Gertrude’s hideous wallpaper, then spiralling, kicking, arms and fingers flailing, like any girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. Boooooring! These girls were certainly hot, Costner thought, and worthy of licking over every inch of their body, yes. There were inches of body they didn’t know existed and his tongue would find them. Would find them all. But they hid it under a definitive not-slutty approach that he couldn’t comprehend. The Lord Jesus didn’t give them maracas like that to hide under a one-piece. Consequently, his head turned toward the edgier, nastier Cherry Bombs, or ‘Cherry Bowls,’ as he called them, because he wanted to eat cherries directly from their rectums.

  The Cherry Bombs, for their part, had saved their skankiest routine for last. That’s making daddy proud. They began their formation in a C-shape that rotated into a ‘U,’ then to an ‘n’, and then broke into a T-shape. They then fell onto their backs, as they had so often done, and synched into the form of a huge vagina. Their legs shot into the air like daggers and each side stabbing at the other like a hideous swamp beast with teeth around its vagina. Costner was initially confused, then intrigued, engrossed, and ultimately aroused by the deep statement on the theme of pussy power.

  The Nazi sharks began their routine in earnest. They had formed a harsh, rectangular formation, with the Shark Fuhrer at the lead. Their pattern remained synchronized, yes, but constant, without any flourish or variation, making their routine the most unambitious and belabored of the three. Of course, the sharks weren’t there to compete—they were there to eat. And they, much like Costner, liked what they were seeing: hot, sexy lunch.

  Costner and the sharks thought at once, “I’d like to eat that.” But who stood a better chance at succeeding? Here’s a hint: it’s the sharks.

  Unaware of the sharks’ presence, the Queens unleashed their secret weapon. Not that sudden, warm stream of urine Andrea thought she felt. That was an accident and Nikki had hoped no-one noticed. Not having time to prepare a new routine, Edwina had decided, “We’re sexing that shit up,” and so they did. As they’d planned, the Queens tore off their pre-ripped one-pieces to reveal heavenly bodies unsullied by cloth, completely painted in waterproof body paint to resemble sexy fishwomen. “We can do it,” Edwina had told the girls, “we can combine tits and talent. And then combine that with ungodly fish mutants.”

  As though a fishing hook were lodged in Costner’s dense skull, his head suddenly and almost involuntarily began turning to the Queens. What he saw would defile many a tissue and keep his hands busy for years. “How did they know?” he wondered. “My lifelong obsession with fishwomen has at last been fulfilled.” Of course, Costner had a lifelong obsession with many things: faeries, centaur girls, Catholic schoolgirls, amputees, the head from The Head that Wouldn’t Die, and, naturally, Bugs Bunny in drag.

  When Costner finally did look back at the Cherry Bombs, they were finalizing the slice of performance art they’d titled, “Sea Cunt, Sea Cunt Run, Run Cunt Run.” Even their sly reference to The Postman was completely lost on Costner, who was immersed in the Queens’ Waterworld. He turned just in time to see Sherry hoisted onto the shoulders of the Bombs, her legs spread as wide apart as possible. Her angry, red vagina stared at him from her crotchless bikini bottom like an evil hypnotist. Then, like an overstuffed Pop Tart, Sherry’s cherry innards gushed from her open orifice. Costner scarcely even registered the presence of the shark that had chomped her. Sherry’s gore rained down from the rent torso over the shrieking Cherry Bombs. With entrails hanging over
her shoulders, Ginger the Cherry Bomb began swimming to shore. The others followed, Pepper unconsciously carrying Sherry’s leg with her like a floatation device, club, or elaborate time-telling device.

  Edwina watched in undiluted horror as the shark swam away from the scene with a piece of intestine hanging out of its mouth—how embarrassing! Like a stubborn piece of spaghetti, it sucked the intestine down its throat and swam toward the Queens at an unholy pace.

  Mila suddenly wished she could walk on water and hoped Jesus might do her a solid. But to no avail, she could still only sink or swim, that age-old metaphor. Somehow it doesn’t feel so cliché when you’re trying to escape from demonic sharks with Nazi cyborg powers.

  Screams resounded over the ocean signalling the consumption of more Cherry Bombs. From his position on the shore, Costner’s erection had completely died—much to his credit—and he remained frozen in abject horror as sharks sank their monstrous teeth into two more Cherry Bombs. Such a waste of tits and ass!

  “Hurry!” Nikki shouted back to Mila, who had begun trailing behind the rest of the girls.

  “I’m trying!” Mila shouted.

  That’s when Nikki noticed her friend had no feet left! Mila’s gushing stumps crashed against the ocean with admirable fury, propelling her with speeds impressive in any Special Olympics. But the sharks were not so impressed. With disgusting, totalitarian sadism they chomped her stumps down bit by bit, until they were to her knees. Still, Mila kicked those gradually disappearing legs like a wind-up bath toy.

  “We have to help her!” Nikki shouted to the others.

  But it was too late. Mila’s stumps could propel no more and at last, unable to swim, she sank. The one time she’d asked for a physically impossible miracle, Jesus let her down. Way down, to the bottom of the sea.

  The other Queens had reached the shore, a strange, huddled mass of panicked fishwomen. Costner was right there, helping them—and how he wished it were under better circumstances. In blubbering anticipation, the naked babes shuddered at the shore, hoping Mila would resurface. When all hope seemed to be lost, the limbless Mila somehow wriggled to shore, smiling like the happiest wormwoman you ever saw.

  “I made it!” she exclaimed excitedly, unaware of pain, blood loss, horrifying deformity, or Nikki’s sudden need to vomit. “Let’s go watch Breaking Bad.”

  She wriggled further ashore to stop herself choking on the waves, paying no heed to the sharks flying from the ocean behind her. One sank its teeth into the buttocks of a fleeing Cherry Bomb who had thought she was safe. Like a mock rendition of the Coppertone girl, it pulled her to sea by the badonkadonk.

  “You always said I had too much junk in my trunk,” she cried in detached shock to her one surviving teammate, who at that moment was being pulverized beneath a flopping shark. The weight of the beast crushed her ribcage into her lungs before she had time to worry about that sudden and unexpected charley horse. As her life breathed out, the shark slapped her dying mammaries with an insolent fin and returned to sea.

  The Bubblegum Queens realized they had to get Mila away from the shore, but were unsure of how or wear to grab her. “Dammit!” Edwina shouted, “no time to stand around!” She grabbed Mila’s double-Ds and started to pull her up the beach when the Shark Fuhrer itself leaped onto the shore. Its cold, demonic eyes and Edwina’s met with pure hatred and a contest of wills. A contest the shark easily won by snatching Mila’s pelvis in its mouth and throwing her like a discus to a waiting shark on its left. The waiting shark caught her and devoured her like a Gummi worm. Good pass, man.

  “Noooo!” Edwina shouted.

  The Queens restrained Edwina as she tried to run at the Shark Fuhrer in blind fury. Frustrated by her friends’ good intentions, she crumbled to the ground in tears. Only then did she notice she still had Mila’s breasts in her hands and threw them away with a shriek.

  The sharks receded into the ocean, regrouping to think over strategy/dessert. All that was left of Mila was her rack. The Cherry Bombs had been eaten completely. And they were late for Judge Judy. Somehow everything seemed empty. As Costner pleaded with the Queens to recuperate in his homemade jacuzzi, they could think of nothing but going home.

  Chapter 19

  The Sheriff Refuses to Develop as a Character

  Agent Walker sat staring the wily, old sheriff in his sly, gray eyes. Somehow they were like the eyes of a lizard, leathery and clever. To the Sheriff, Walker seemed an irrational fool, cloaked in his unflinching depression—but was it depression or a put-on? In the absence of the facts, the Sheriff decided only one thing was certain, “I don’t like that man’s face,” he told himself, “and that’s a fact.”

  Walker, for his part, was only recalling the least amusing episode of Night Court. There were many contenders, but one drew him to the depths of despondency and deprived him of faith in humanity. The canned laughter, Marky Post’s rumpled skirt, and the misuse of John Larroquette’s comedic talents… Walker sighed.

  Warren finally walked into the office after much business at the largely non-functional photocopier/fax machine.

  “Sheriff,” he announced, “I believe we just got your facts.”

  “Nope,” the sheriff answered. “Facts aren’t something you go believing in. That’s what crop circles and a good woman are for. Facts’ll grab you by the head and press your face into their perfumed bosoms until you can’t breathe worth a damn, but you like it anyway.”

  Controlling his rising anger, his face reddening like a newborn mole, Warren dropped his freshly photocopied docket on the Sheriff’s desk. “We have several witnesses of a shark attack—right in front of their faces!”

  “You got a report that there are witnesses,” the Sheriff stubbornly insisted. “Maybe there are. Maybe there aren’t.”

  “Well, I think we should at least go see the…alleged witnesses.”

  “Alright,” the Sheriff conceded. “Let’s see if we can separate the real witnesses from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and come out of this an Indian Winner.”

  Warren didn’t know what the hell that meant, but at least he’d gotten the fossil to agree to something constructive. He touched the voodoo charm he always kept in his pocket and whispered under his breath, “Thank you.”

  (Chapter 20

  A Conversation with John Maynard Beans

  by Nick Prepstone

  “You’d be surprised what the Nazis tried,” Beans told me, a glint in his eye reminiscent of the most orgiastic scenes from a Visconti film. Maybe I’d be surprised what Beans had tried.

  “Oh yeah?” I probed.

  He fiddled with his tofu curry in the student-run vegetarian restaurant, Finnegans Bake. My question seemed to puzzle him. His stringy, white hair expressed confusion, concern, and deception. He lodged a chunk of tofu into the moist, red orifice.

  “When there are no limitations, not social, not moral—limitations imposed only by the laws of nature and logic, well, you can imagine.”

  But what did he imagine? This was the man making thousands of dollars every time a Nazi shark got mentioned. And here he was with his tofu and his hair and me.

  “Oh yeah?” I probed.

  “I’m working on the follow-up,” he released, crumbling under the pressure. “In this one—well, we found more papers. We knew they were there, we just didn’t know where exactly and there was red tape. It was like being well-constipated. But we got to them at last. The detailed notes of Researchmeister Sigmund Sigersbaum’s assistants and the man’s own personal diary. Pass the salt.”

  I handed him the octagonal salt shaker, which he gripped with the hand of a man who had loved and lost, chosen a life of obscure research over romance, friends, family. He applied the salt liberally, quipping, “My remaining vice.” Yet, I never once felt this man to have hypertension.

  “Oh yeah?” I pressed.

  He looked at me with a quizzically raised eyebrow, unsure of where I was going, what this interview meant. He was used to the fawning crazies who eat up
garbage like Stonehenge Doomsday, UFOs and Evolution, and, of course, Jesus: Last of the Dinosaurs.

  “Sigersbaum’s outline was all we’d had before,” Beans at last confessed. “That outline was the basis of the whole documentary—and a little footage. Initially there was a mistranslation, and I believed the sharks were genetically modifying Nazis. But that was never substantiated. Never disproven, mind. Let’s be scientific.”

  “Oh yeah?” I insisted.

  “Are you alright?” he asked me, to which I only smirked. I noticed his salad-like stack of roughage had been steadily decreasing, revealing glimmers of brown, non-descript plate. The thin, boyish waitresses walked by frequently, glancing to see if he’d finished consuming the organic substances, their mosquito-bite breasts revealing no more than their smooth, ironic faces.

  “From the outline,” Beans explained, refusing a water refill with his hands, his eyes, and his mind, “it was never clear just how extensive the Nazis were modifying the sharks. I supposed their modifications to be primarily behavioral. Training some sharks to consume American divers, or do some deep-sea reconnaissance with strap-on cameras. Just eating and strap-ons? That’s pussy stuff. Turns out they were pushing the boundaries of genetic modification, brain alteration, and even cybernetics. Just incredible stuff, Mr.—sorry, who are you again?”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he moaned with narcissistic pleasure while crunching a crouton. “Well, each shark was a unique outcome of the extensive modifications. Metal teeth. They tried that. Pneumatic jaws. Enhanced vision. Eye lasers—I don’t even understand that myself. Advanced intelligence. One shark, which Sigersbaum had dubbed the Shark Fuhrer, could complete multiplication tables even while Sigersbaum’s inordinately attractive wife performed an elaborate striptease. This advance backfired, however. Sigersbaum came to resent the relationship between his wife and the Shark Fuhrer, ultimately accusing her of being pregnant with sharks. This was not in his research notes. His subsequently instilling in all the sharks extreme misogyny, however, was, and his many gruesome tests corroborate.”