Veneer by Daniel Verastiqui Page B

his shirt.
    Be careful with that, thought Deron, I need that blood to live.
    It only took Russo a moment to reconcile the stains away. Evidently satisfied with his handiwork, he walked over and stopped a few inches away from Deron’s face.
    Deron could see his boots plainly, shiny black with thick soles. They probably weighed a few pounds each. Russo said something, but the ringing in his ears drowned it out. It was probably just another threat, something about his superiority—it didn’t really matter. All Deron cared about were those boots. They were all he could see. They were immediate. And when one of them disappeared, the insanity revved up. It began talking to the boot, asking it where it was flying away to. Was it not happy there on the grass with Deron? There was nothing better than lying face down in Easton’s finest Bermuda.
    The mystery of Russo’s boot unraveled in a brief and unsatisfying way. After being gone for an eternity and Deron unable to locate it in time and space, he felt it reappear on the back of his neck. His brain registered the sudden pressure of the boot’s treads as they pushed unevenly at the base of his skull. They tore a little at first, making the skin redden in instant bruises. But that was all minor compared to the crushing weight that followed.
    And just like that, the other boot disappeared too, along with the rest of the world.
     
     
    Lights scrolled by overhead. It was a common scene from movies and in-game cinematics, a way to show the viewpoint of a victim whose existence had become nothing but waiting for the next light to come up and the last one to sink out of view. They should have put something over his eye, the one that worked, the one he couldn’t command to close no matter how hard he tried.
    There was nothing worth seeing out there, nothing he wanted to see. But they kept showing him things. Lights, mostly, but then someone turned his head. It was an ancient nurse with bad skin and wrinkles around her eyes.
    When his head went the other way, Deron saw a doctor with a mask over his face. He had large eyebrows that ran from one side to the other uninterrupted. He was squinting at Deron, looking for what?
    A realization: this was no hospital.
    He was in some kind of abandoned building with blank evercrete walls that looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in years. Everything was covered in dirt and grime.
    The nurse pulled his head again and Deron felt something pop in his neck. He screamed a silent and horrifying scream. He saw the alarm in the nurse’s eyes, the red veins that stood out so brightly around her iris.
    There were harsh words muffled by the pain.
    All at once, it began to fade. The scrolling lights grew dimmer. Something passed through his field of view. It vaguely resembled a palette, except that it was blank. Cold and blank. Like the world. Like existence.
    Deron took a labored breath, felt as if his lungs were filled with shards of glass.
    They couldn’t keep him there, no matter how loudly they yelled at each other, no matter how fast they pushed the gurney. He was going to a place beyond the confines of his mortal body.
    He couldn’t see it, but he believed it was there.
     

PART TWO
     
     
    Three weeks.
    Three weeks to the day of not being able to see Deron, of curt updates from his mom that merely confirmed he wasn’t dead yet. It was time spent sitting in uncomfortable plastic chairs in the hallway, of being hassled by the nurses, and being told that his girlfriend had no legal visitation rights. That’s what hurt Rosalia the most, the idea that their relationship meant nothing in the adult world. She cared for him with all her soul, but because they weren’t married, because they were minors, she couldn’t walk through the door to his room and hold his hand.
    So she waited—in the hallway, in her room, and in the private bubble she adopted while at school. There were rumors flying around, about Deron, about the list of suspects, though