Nazi Sharks! (6 page)

“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

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

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 chicken. 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.”

“What if he’s the Shakatitt
Shark?” Andrea asked, at last voicing her fears. It felt like a
coffee enema in her soul, except not as wet or energizing.

Of all her friends, Edwina was
the hardest to read, more like
Finnegans Wake
than
Goosebumps: Say Cheese and Die
. The undeclared leader of the
gang, Edwina had all the poise, beauty, confidence, and never
seemed to fart. She had an unpleasant childhood that she’d only
talk about when sleeping within two miles of a Taco Bell. Nothing
in her seemed abrasive, but she did seem to be a magnet for
negative forces, as though the world itself said, ‘Oh come on!’ She
learned to swim so well because every boat she’d board would be
sure to sink, every slice of bread in her toaster to kinda burn,
not enough so you can quite throw it out, but enough that you can’t
enjoy it much either.

The Bubblegum Queens all looked
to Andrea. “I mean, Burt Reynolds can’t be easy to live up to. The
pressure could drive anyone…”

“A little crazy,” Nikki agreed,
nodding her head. “Just like Burt Reynolds’ performance
in…uhh…”

“Life,” Steph finished with a
shrug.

“Yeah, that.”

“I’ll throw you a bone,” Edwina
told them. “
Sharky’s Machine
.”

“You just solved the murders!”
Mila exclaimed. “It’s him!”

“I’m leaving,” Edwina replied
with bemusement. “Don’t wait up.”

Edwina left like a breeze
amidst cherry blossoms, Andrea thought, carefree, unpolluted, and
attracted to Hispanic men. That kind of freedom was hard-earned,
Andrea realized, and respected Edwina for it the way she respected
a particularly strong cheddar. Edwina had been a boyish girl in
school with a passion for dinosaur anatomy and mating practices.
Andrea recalled fondly how teacher after teacher tried to beat this
out of her, but Edwina would only use these as ‘studies in dinosaur
deviance.’ Despite this intellectual bent, her face resembled
neither a pizza nor a clam chowder, and her body had taken the
curvaceous shape of a robot cheerleader. When she made her
valedictorian speech wearing only a chemise (to make a point, and
she made many), those who had called her ‘Dinoporn,’ for years
regretted it and even took a keen interest in it themselves.
Andrea, on the other hand, regretted having worn anything at all.
Friendly competition aside, Andrea probably loved no-one more than
Eddie, except for Scott Valentine. She—they all, really—had been
attracted to Edwina like gorgeous, busty iron filings to a magnet.
She was Edwina.

After a few moments of silence,
Mila started up again, as Andrea knew she would—it was so Mila to
let the mood mellow and then rev it up again like a monkey on
waterskis.

“He was in
Deliverance
,”
she said.

“Does he kill anyone in that?”
Nikki asked.

“Just hillbillies. Does that
even count?”

“Hillbillies are people, too,”
Andrea blurted, instantly regretting it, because, deep down, she
didn’t believe it anyway. She always told herself, ‘You don’t
defend an idea you don’t believe in, stupid!’ “They’re born, just
like me and you, except without sanitation and always during an
episode of
Steve Wilkos
. They have hopes and dreams, like
that one where they’re being fried up by roadkill and
it’s
going to eat
them
.”

Mila rolled her eyes and went
silent. Andrea knew Mila would tweet about this later.

“Still,” Andrea said, “I’m
worried about Eddie.”

“Me too,” Steph agreed,
“there’s a funny vibe tonight. A dangerous vibe.”

“Dangerous and stupid,” Andrea
agreed.

Chapter 14

There was Sheena. Her massive
melons proudly jutted forward in the moonlight like exhibits in a
planetarium. The ocean wind raked her silvery blonde hair and the
surf splashed around her tight, bronzed body, mingling with the
drool puddling before her three admirers. She led the Pussy Willows
with an iron tit. Now she’d led them, as any great leader must
sometimes do, to some topless swimming in dangerous, shark-infested
waters with three, horny douchebags whose only assets were ‘Hey,
nice abs!’

“Aren’t you
guys
afraid
of the shark?” Sheena asked the douchebags defiantly. She didn’t
know their names. None of the girls did. Maybe the guys didn’t,
either. What did names really mean in a world of pure sensation, a
world comprised of oceans, tits, and cheap vodka?

“Yeah, so?” one guy said. “Tits
win. Like, every time.”

The other two guys agreed with
this sentiment wholeheartedly enough to provide a round of
fist-bumps.

“I don’t think we should be
here,” Lisa said, trying to hide how she was shivering, but her
jiggling jugs could hide nothing (except that coupon for $1 off
Oikos Yogurt she’d forgotten there last week).

“That’s so existential,” the
second douchebag said, his head nodding with ponderous agreement.
“I often feel the same way. Like, why? Why me? Why life? Why
anything at all? I dunno. We could just be, like, nothing. Nothing
at all.”

Lisa’s brain hurt and she
didn’t understand. And she hadn’t even eaten any ice cream. “I
mean—I don’t wanna be eaten by sharks,” she said. “I think that’d
really suck.”

“Yeah, me too,” Vicky
agreed.

“That’s deep, too,” douchebag
two agreed, because he’d agree with anything as long as those
hypnotizers were out, “I guess.”

Sheena turned her attention
from the allure of the sea. It was an allure than went back
centuries in her family of great seafarers who had braved the
mysteries of the sea to discover lands and creatures unutterable in
these pages (or stayed home and lied about it). She regarded the
fools behind her and grew irritated.

“Shut your kale-holes!” she
shouted. “I need my tits moistened in cool, sea brine each night or
my swimming’s off for weeks. You know this.”

“But Sheena,” Lisa whined, “the
competition’s been aborted. Just like your babies.”

“Hah!” Sheena shouted in
defiance, her breasts raised like an ogre’s mace, ready to squash a
village of peaceful, yet annoying elves. “I’m mega-fertile and so
is this beach—for competition, that is! Just give it a few
days.”

“Am I gonna have to pay for an
abortion?” the third douchebag asked. But his inquiry fell on deaf
ears, for Sheena immediately ran into the sea to feel the saline
fluid rejuvenate her mammaries. All guys followed like zombies.
Tit-loving zombies.

“Hey!” Lisa shouted, growing
panicky. “This isn’t existential at all! Come back, guys!”

“You heard the girl!” Vicky
shouted back. “We have to moisten these tits in cool, sea
brine.”

“Not existential at all,” Lisa
muttered to herself, collapsing onto the beach and sulking, her
breasts hanging with pendulous dismay. As she watched the others
frolic with abandon, she covered up her tits with a bikini top,
clothing herself out of pure resentment.

Lisa was too absorbed in her
tantrum and repressed daddy issues to even notice the gleaming
blade-like protrusions in the water, cutting across the moonlight
path. If she had, would she have warned her stupid companions?
Would that make her a bad person by inaction? These moral questions
would be studied for years if anyone at all cared to pose them.

The sharks, for sure, couldn’t
care less. They saw a meal before them. But maybe there was some
real depth to these sharks. Maybe they didn’t just see a meal, but
victims, whose consumption was a ritual act of absorbing another’s
lifeforce, a sexual act of totally overpowering another body, a
political act in the name of the Fuhrer. Nah. These sharks were
monsters and they were going to enjoy destroying beautiful things.
The tits would fly.