"Have you ever fucked a fish?"
Ennis Ezquerra chose to drop that little gem, casual-like, around the campfire during mess.
"Ezquerra, what the fuck are you talking about?" Donald Finney asked.
The whole unit knew Ezquerra was a completely disgusting fucker with few, if any, redeeming social graces. Picture the greasiest excuse for a building super you could think of. You know, the kind of lardass that spends his days squatting in the basement of a part-firetrap, part-cockroach breeding factory in a white string vest covered in yellow food stains and fuck knows what else. You can see him now, right? Lank greasy hair combed over a bald spot. Flesh broiled pink like a slightly off lobster.
That would be Ennis Ezquerra's slightly more presentable brother.
To anyone looking at him, it would be a mystery why the military admitted such an obvious slob as Ezquerra, but that would be because they weren't looking hard enough. Beneath that pudgy flesh Ezquerra had muscle. Slabs and slabs of muscle. He was a quick fucker as well. Finney knew from their casual pigskin games you did not want to get hit by Ezquerra at full speed.
Ezquerra had played linebacker for his college. He might have gone all the way to the pro leagues if it hadn't been for that unfortunate incident with the college mascot.
'She looked all purty with her long silky hair,' Ezquerra offered as explanation to anyone who asked.
Everyone knew Ezquerra was a dirty fucking bastard who'd fuck anything so long as it had a hole. Alive and female preferably, but Ezquerra wasn't exactly picky.
Any hole's a goal, as he was fond of saying.
"Okay, Ezquerra," Jack Richter said. "Just how in the fuck do you fuck a fish?"
Did they really want the answer to that question? Finney thought.
"Well you catch it fresh," Ezquerra started. He was currently holding his combat knife. "So it's still wriggling like crazy. You get your knife and you run it down its belly just like this," he mimed on empty air with his knife. "Then you slide the little whore right over your boner. I tell you it feels fucking incredible with the little bitch wriggling away like a bastard, her guts sliding all over your cock."
The squad was shocked into silence.
"How do you know it's a she?" Finney asked.
"Well I ain't exactly going to picture it as a he am I," Ezquerra said.
Phil Sutherland, the new boy, looked like he was about to throw up.
"Not hungry anymore?" Ezquerra said, eyeing up the other man's canteen. "I'll take that then, Sonny."
W.D. Kaufman shook his head. "Ezquerra, you are one muthafuckin' disgustin' individual."
And that was how Fish Fucker came to be called Fish Fucker.
* * * *
"Zat your girlfriend back home?" Ezquerra asked.
Finney hadn't heard Ezquerra enter the tent. He was staring at a photo of him and Brooke Cartwright. They were standing against a railing with Niagara Falls in the background. He'd dug it out to get a little reminder of home.
"Yeah," Finney replied. It was the easy answer.
The reality was a little more complex.
He liked her. She was sweet. She had a hot body. But...
She was his first and only girlfriend. They'd been high school sweethearts. They'd been together nearly four years now. He hadn't planned for it to last that long. It was school. Practise. Now she was starting to talk the serious stuff—marriage, kids, mortgages, that kind of stuff. Stuff that scared the shit out of him.
He stared at the photo.
He didn't think he loved her.
"Miss her?" Ezquerra asked.
"Yeah," Finney said.
Again, it was the easy answer.
"Or do you miss the...oomph?"
Ezquerra didn't really need to add the fist pump for Finney to understand what he meant.
"Fuck yeah," Finney replied.
Now that was a truthful answer. He'd been out here for a month now. His sock had developed a crust no amount of washing would ever shift.
"Found something that'll fix that," Ezquerra said, displaying heretofore unseen levels of crypticity.
Finney looked at him with a puzzled expression.
Ezquerra tapped his nose and led him out the back of the tent. Finney shook his head. He was probably going to regret this. He followed Ezquerra as he led him a short way out of the small camp, up a short incline and around a rocky bluff. There was vegetation here, if it could be called that. This wasn't Earth.
Yeah, that was the biggest complexity of all.
He'd told Brooke he'd been stationed out in the desert for manoeuvres. That was all he'd been allowed to tell her. It was partly correct. The part he'd neglected to mention was the desert didn't happen to be on Earth. The scientists called it H-Space. It was some kind of weird alternate dimension they'd busted a doorway into.
It sounded more exciting than it actually was. Once the initial
wow!
factor wore off it was the same old lugging heavy packs through rocks and dirt.
"Where we going, Ezquerra?" Finney asked as they picked their way up a steep hillside.
"Sumfink I found," Ezquerra said. "It's fucking awesome."
Ezquerra's definition of 'fucking awesome' included a wide variety of things, some of which were totally gross and disgusting. Finney followed him anyway.
The sky was a constant reminder they weren't on Earth. It was a roiling mass of purples and pinks, like bruised flesh. It always looked like it was on the verge of a storm, but Finney had never experienced one, or even seen rain.
The vegetation looked like clumps of grass and small shrubs, but it was red—like blood—instead of green. It also had a disconcerting habit of moving when not looked at directly.
The scientists said it was an optical illusion. One of the theories was H-Space had weird magnetic fields that screwed around with perception. They certainly screwed around with the equipment. Nothing electronic worked correctly out here. It was like being back in the nineteenth century—grunts and shovels. They were about a week's hard slog from the entrance camp and they had to rely on guys on bicycles to courier messages back and forth. Crazy.
They rounded a rocky corner and Finney suddenly found himself looking down on an idyllic oasis. Pretty, he thought. A small waterfall emerged from about halfway up the sheer rock face and cascaded down into a small pool. Lush vegetation sprouted around the water. Again, it wasn't like Earth vegetation. The leaves and stems were coloured in fleshy tones rather than verdant greens. The colours leant a strangely erotic feel to the plants. There was something oddly sensual and sinful in the way the branches twisted and tangled over each other.
