Nazi Sharks! (10 page)

Chapter 19

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

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.”

I nodded my head in disbelief.
A crazy story growing crazier by the sentence. His salad had
reached its crazy conclusion and the Professor was rising from his
seat, leaving me the tab.

“Oh yeah?” I badgered.

“I have a plane to catch,” he
evaded, either unable or unwilling to answer my questions further.
“My expertise is required in the scintillating locale of Shakatitt
Beach, as it happens. Watch the documentary for the details and—the
evidence!”

I sat down and gazed at the
empty plate of tofu salad left behind and calculated the tip.
$3.25.)

Chapter 21

The Sheriff emerged from his
SUV like a clam falling from a gull’s mouth. A clam that doesn’t
quite trust gravity works until it splats on a rock. The Sheriff
didn’t splat, however. With his pipe preceding him like a dousing
rod, it drew him straight to the Bubblegum Queens. The paramedics
flagging him down deserve some of the credit, of course.

Walker and Warren arrived not
long after. Warren’s hands were nervously kept behind his back as
he hurried to overtake the Sheriff, whose interrogation style, he
imagined, wouldn’t be entirely unlike quicksand made of
limburger.

Edwina had been watching the
lawmen approach, shivering in her blanket. Andrea’s head rested on
her shoulder, staring blankly at the ground. This would be sexy,
were they not traumatized. Edwina found herself thinking of the
many, many times she had purposely overfed Mila’s Tamagotchi to
death. Now she regretted it. She’d find a Tamagotchi on eBay and
take good care of the digital beast. “I’ll do it for Mila,” she
thought.

The Sheriff took his pipe from
his mouth after regarding Edwina for some time, then nodded. He
pivoted to meet the approaching FBI agents. He had planned the
pivot to be rather dramatic, but he lacked much of the nimbleness
necessary.

“I think he’s going to sneeze,”
Walker noted, drawing a handkerchief.

“Listen,” the Sheriff stated.
“Ladies look pretty traumatized. Give ‘em that. Saw something
already. Maybe a murder. Maybe an alien abduction. Maybe a
shark-attack. Maybe—”

Hearing the word ‘shark,’ Nikki
began shrieking like a banshee with obscenely bad haemorrhoids.
Steph and Edwina held her close and rubbed her arms to make her
feel safe, in a comforting, womblike place. One of the paramedics,
whose name was Ron Altofeel, placed his fingers to his temples and
thought, “You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re in your happy place.” As
he did so, Nikki ceased shrieking and she began instead sobbing
into Steph’s blanket. Steph continued the comforting caresses over
Nikki’s back. Ron Altofeel smiled a deep smile of self-satisfaction
and returned to the driver’s seat, where he accidentally sat on a
stick of beef jerky. “They will never know,” he thought, “it was
I.”

“It’s a fact now, Sheriff,”
Warren growled, approaching the creaking old law enforcement
machinery with indignation. To the Sheriff, he resembled a horribly
mutated squirrel after a storm of peanut butter. “Fortunately for
you,” he continued, “we went ahead and called in our expert. He’ll
be here soon.”

The Sheriff paced to the
bloody, bubbling shore where one of Sherry’s feet had been
regurgitated by a fussier of the Nazi sharks. He regarded the foot
stoically, never having been much of a foot man.

Warren and Walker exchanged
glances of puzzlement and frustration, on Warren’s side, and
disappointment on Walker’s. Walker was beginning to think this
wouldn’t be their breakthrough into more sensible cases. He was
tired of getting the weird cases. Also, he hadn’t adequately
buttered his toast that morning and felt strongly that he had
wasted the slices.

“Yep,” the Sheriff at last
agreed with nothing in particular. “Like I always told you,
gentlemen. Couldas and beliefs and what-ifs—they’ll tickle you
under the covers when you’re not looking and you wonder where those
bumps came from ‘cause you ain’t seen nothing, but you know
something got you. But facts. They’ll just come right up to you,
right in front of your face, and give you a solid bite!”

The unambiguous embodiment of
cold-blooded facticity, that mass of muscle and teeth that exists
for its own sake, exploded like a volcano from the damp sand under
which it had disguised itself and compressed its massive jaws
around the Sheriff’s brittle upper torso. He snapped like an animal
cracker and continued to be crunched to tough, bloody pieces in the
shark’s jaws. The sounds of his own body crunching like a Werther’s
Original struck the Sheriff’s ears with a peculiarly dreamlike
reality, as did the gushing of his own blood into his face. It all
seemed less real than anything he’d ever experienced. And yet, it
was the most undeniably factual reality before him.

“Y’see,” he burbled as he
drowned in his own blood and shark-spit. QED.

Before the astonished eyes of
the FBI agents, a second shark bashed itself ashore to consume the
still-standing legs of the Sheriff like an after-dinner mint. The
sound of the brittle, old legs would resound for decades in the
traumatized ears of the onlookers and not one of them would ever
eat a chocolate-covered locust. Ron Altofeel absently ate the jerky
he’d found and wondered, “Did I cause that?”

Warren drew his pistol and
pointed it defensively at the ocean as the first shark reared its
Nazi head above the surface. With a sound like a pound of beef
striking a dog in the face, the shark coughed and expelled from its
gullet a mysterious, black object. The object twirled through the
air and landed two inches from Warren’s foot: the Sheriff’s
pipe.

Like an exclamation point in
the sand, the pipe ended the moment and the girls began screaming
in horror. Paramedics administered sedatives, even Ron Altofeel,
with syringes this time.

“Damn,” Warren muttered.

“That was both ironic and
disturbing,” Walker noted, staring at the pipe.

“We need that expert. And the
army. Correction: the goddamn army.”

Chapter 22

“It’s all my fault!” Edwina
wailed to the girls as Steph and Nikki packed their bags.

“No,” Andrea comforted.

“It is! I might as well have
dislocated my jaw, grew a few extra rows of teeth, and chomped her
myself!”

“Come on!” Andrea demurred,
forcing Edwina’s head to her shoulder for a cry. “That’s not true
and also kinda stupid.”

They were fully clothed. That’s
how depressed they were. Gone were the t-shirts and bikini bottoms.
Sexy had been drowned in tears and eaten by the sharks of grief.
Alas!

“It’s true!” Edwina shouted.
“I’m just a huge sharkbitch.”

With that, Edwina did begin
sobbing. She always cried when she was called a sharkbitch, but
never more than when it felt so true.

“Yeah, Eddie,” Steph agreed,
“don’t say that. Not only does it make no sense, it’s not true. The
Cherry Bombs caused the trouble. And they got what was coming to
them.”

“Nobody deserves that…” Edwina
replied.

“You’re right… I’m sorry.”

“What about Hitler?” Nikki
asked, looking up from her panty-folding with sudden intensity.

“Well, okay,” Steph replied.
“Sure.”

“I read a bit about Hitler,”
Andrea stated. “Can’t say I care for the man. Not at all.”

“Thanks, guys,” Edwina told the
Queens, wiping her eyes. “But I still feel like a major
bitchstorm.”

“Even if Mila were with us—the
competition’d still be over,” Steph pointed out. “We’re the only
team left. And y’know, if the competition had been not getting
eaten by sharks, we’d be winners.”