Veneer by Daniel Verastiqui Page A

over. Stumbling, Deron managed to raise his eyes to see Russo standing there, a twisted smile on top of his normal veneer. He held a metal pipe in his hand. It looked dull and out of place in the shimmering world.
    “I told you we had business.”
    Despite the pain, a knot of worry began to tighten in Deron’s chest. He knew this wasn’t going to be like Destined 4 Death or even the kung fu movies he watched late at night. No part of what was about to happen would be choreographed for the safety of the actors.
    It would be brutal and it was going to hurt. A lot.
    Deron opened his mouth to respond, but Russo had already closed the distance. Putting his hands up to protect his face, Deron felt the pipe strike his forearms, making them tingle at first and then burn a moment later as the signals reached his brain. It came from the left, from the right, and sometimes glanced off his arms and connected with his head. He leaned backwards, tried to escape the barrage, but couldn’t hold his balance. The next moment, he was falling, collapsing onto the worn grass.
    His right eye felt funny, as if someone had their thumb pressed to it. There was too much of a blur to even tell which way was up.
    The taste of blood distracted Deron long enough to miss the pipe flying through the air; it caught him on the left side of his temple. Stars erupted all around him in little golden explosions, as if reality were just a palette and some first-grader learning to reconcile had suddenly decided that what it needed most were twinkling decorations. He knew the pipe was nearby, even reached out for it, but before his fingers could locate it in the grass, Russo’s boot came crashing down on his elbow.
    Russo pulled Deron to his feet and shoved him towards the bleachers. The metal scaffolding was rounded but solid—so much of his body had already gone numb that he barely registered the impact. A few feet away, Russo stood alternating from one foot to the other, jacked with adrenaline, concentration in his eyes.
    It was time to rage quit , as Sebo put it. Had this been a session of D4D, the frustration of losing would have already taken over and he would have jacked out and punched Sebo in the chest for cheating.
    Deron groaned, tried to spit out the excess blood but ended up with most of it on his chest and hanging from his chin. Something felt weird in his head, like a fluctuating headache. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, not even the fleeting hope of being able to fight. He flashed on Rosalia and her misguided attempt to help him. There was anger there, a desire to punish, but that only made him furious. She loved him more than any girl before her. She wasn’t to blame for the beating.
    Russo was.
    Summoning his last bit of strength, Deron shot forward and began swinging. He felt his fists land a few times, but mostly they caught the wind. Russo moved around them with ease and the smile on his face was so bright that it broke through the blur in his vision. The momentary adrenaline rush waned, and Deron felt the twinge in all his joints. His lungs burned and his lips tasted tears. Closing his eyes for an instant, he retreated to the eternal darkness, only to be pulled back by something bony catching him on his jaw.
    All the grass in Easton was engineered to be soft and pleasing to the eye, but nowhere was it more comforting than the patch behind the bleachers at Easton Central. It reached up to support Deron as he fell, cradling him as best it could. He ended up face down in a heap and in a moment of perverse humor, he imagined what the chalk outline would look like when the police discovered the body. Not that they would need to chalk up the grass when they could just reconcile the scene on their palettes, but still.
    He shook his head to clear the insanity, to inventory his situation.
    Only one eye still worked and he used it to search the horizon for Russo. He found him standing near the bleachers absently brushing the blood away from