Nazi Sharks! (13 page)

“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

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.

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.