Bloody Fucking Hell
By
Nenad Mitrovi?
Fucking little cowards, he thought.
The drummer was scrolling through his phone between beats, his thumb moving as if he were searching for a teleport out of the garage.
The bassist stared at the wall, at a damp stain shaped like the map of a country none of them would ever visit.
And she sat on the amplifier, legs crossed in ripped tights, still holding up well for a girl from the old guard, her smile once meaning we survived the nineties, now meaning only I’m bored out of my skull.
Johnny was playing a riff he’d come up with the week before.
He’d planned to build a new song around it.
It was an aggressive sound, tight, precise palm muting anchored on the low strings, E and A.
He slammed into drop D with violent strokes, but the secret wasn’t the tuning — it was his right hand.
That’s where he did the damage. He tore through fast sixteenth-note runs, accents falling in the wrong places, creating that unmistakable thrash feel.
Oh yeah, he thought, right as the riff deliberately tripped over itself, sounding like it — and the guitar in his hands — were about to fall apart, before snapping back into time at the last possible second.
He knew the riff was good. Bloody good. He had a quiet, unwelcome certainty that this was the best thing he’d ever written. He also knew it didn’t matter anymore.
“Let’s try it once more, just a bit slower,” the drummer said, not looking up, purely out of professional courtesy.
Slower. Yeah, right. You miserable little prick. Never tell a guitarist to play slower.
Everything disgusted him. He kept playing — faster, not slower — the sound bouncing off walls padded with foam that had lost its purpose years ago, until a string snapped and nearly took his eye out.
“Fuck!” he yelled, stuffing his split index finger into his mouth.
No one said let’s take a break. They just stopped.
He dropped the guitar — his backup Schecter, not his beloved Gibson — and headed for the bathroom to do a line.
He still had some coke left from last time.
He’d meant to use it to celebrate ten years of Bloody Fucking Hell.
Now? He’d rather get fucked sideways than share his stash with those losers. With traitors.
Yeah. You’re all traitors. FUCKING. TRAITORS.
At the bathroom door he realized he’d forgotten his jacket. The coke was still in it. He turned back.
That’s when he saw her.
She wasn’t hiding. She had no reason to. She stood too close to the drummer. His hand rested casually on her waist. Her mouth opened in a laugh Johnny no longer recognized, and then it simply met his.
No drama. No passion. Like something that had been waiting to happen.
Johnny watched and waited for it to hurt.
It didn’t.
All he felt was emptiness — the same hollow that had been gathering under his breastbone for a while now. Like inhaling air at fifteen below zero.
“Go fuck yourselves!” he shouted. They looked embarrassed. Not enough to apologize. “Fuck you all! I don’t want to see your faces again!”
He grabbed his jacket and stormed out. Fuck her, he thought. There are dozens like her. No — better ones. Younger, hotter, with real metal voices, girls who could growl instead of sounding like amateurs choking on it, girls who knew things. What the fuck did he need her for?
He left without saying goodbye. No one stopped him.
***
Outside, it was the kind of winter you only get in Belgrade in February — dirty, gray, damp, with the ko?ava wind cutting straight through leather jackets.
Snow that never stayed snow, turning to ice the moment it hit the ground.
The sidewalks reminded him of the Serbian metal scene: everything was there — ugly, trampled, torn to pieces — but no one knew how much longer it could survive.
He remembered he’d left his car parked outside High Heels, the “fancy” rock club where he played Fridays and Saturdays, and that he still had two hours before his set.
He downed a brandy in the first bar he came across.
Another in the next. After the third he stopped counting and switched to beer.
The alcohol slid down his throat without resistance, as if his body had already given up.
At High Heels, the weekend gig that paid the rent, the owner greeted him with that smile people wear when they believe they’ve been more than fair.
“Nothing personal, Niki,” he said. As he spoke, his gold signet ring clicked softly against the bar top, steady and impatient, like it had delivered this speech a hundred times before.
“The crowd’s changed. They want something softer.
They’re not into distortion and metal anymore, you know how it is.
We’re tweaking the setlist — some pop bands, a bit of alt-rock, a whole lot of good old Yugoslav rock from the eighties… ”
Nikola nodded. He knew how it was. He also knew there was no point explaining that distortion wasn’t a style — it was an attitude.
He walked out before the conversation was even over.
He was sure he’d punch someone’s teeth out that night, but the alcohol got to him first. He threw up outside the club, watching a tram disappear down Ruzveltova Str.
, leaning against the wall like an old, reliable friend.
The kind that won’t betray you. The kind that understands real music.
His throat burned, his eyes watered, his stomach emptied with a strange sense of relief. When it was over, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and smiled. Briefly. Hollow.
The parking lot lay in half-darkness. His car sat under a thick crust of ice, as if someone had preserved it for a future in which he wouldn’t need it anymore. The lock was frozen, but he managed to force it open. The windshield, though — he couldn’t see shit through it.
No way I’m going anywhere like this, he thought, sober enough for once.
Shit. Just another pile of shit. He scraped at the windshield with his keys, but the ice wouldn’t budge.
His hands were shaking, fingers stiff and numb.
If I just had something to scrape this crap off with, crawl into bed, and not leave the apartment till June — I swear to God.
That’s when he saw something glinting on the ground, by the wheel of his battered Ford Fiesta.
A CD.
An old-school storage relic. No case. No markings. Just a scratched silver disc, tossed there from God knows where — probably a trash bin or the back of a garbage truck.
An idea struck him.
He grabbed it and scraped it hard against the glass. The ice cracked under the pressure, fractures spreading outward. The disc was tough. Durable. Like it was made for this, Johnny thought. Whoever threw it here did me a favor. A fucking big one.
Then another thought followed. Who even uses CDs anymore? These kids wouldn’t know what to do with one even if they had somewhere to put it. It didn’t matter. He cleared the windshield.
He could finally drive. Go home. Lick his wounds.
***
He got into the car. His hands were slick, his head heavy. He drove slowly, but the streets were deceptive. Headlights bled one into another, streetlamps smeared into stains. He picked up the CD and turned it over in his hand.
Such a strange object. Truly strange.
He was sure he had a few discs like that stashed somewhere at home, buried in moldy corners and drawers, though most of that obsolete junk hadn’t survived the big purge he’d done a year or two back.
He wiped it gently and hooked it onto the rearview mirror.
He smiled. He remembered the old early-2000s legend, passed around among drivers, that the silvery glare of a CD could confuse or deflect police radar.
Somewhere in his head, an old chord started playing — something he’d written a long time ago and never finished.
The streets were empty. He felt like the last man on earth.
He felt better. Much better.
That’s when one of Belgrade’s mindless street drifters wandered across the road, wrapped in three layers of reeking military coats.
Johnny jerked the wheel left. The car skidded through the intersection.
It was somewhere around Vo?dovac, maybe near the start of Vojvode Stepe Str.
There was no time to react, not even time to scream.
Just a dull, blunt impact — short, hard — enough to throw him forward and snap him back.
Silence.
The engine was still running. No smoke. Just his heart pounding like a kick drum. He got out, wiped the blood from a split on his forehead, and looked at the damage. From a distance, the bum flipped him off and kept walking toward Autokomanda, lumbering like a ragged bear. It wasn’t that bad.
“What the hell just happened?” he asked out loud. Damage. That’s what happened. All you ever do in life is cause damage. That inner voice sounded disturbingly like his stepmother.
The bumper. A bit of bent metal. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. He stood there in the cold for a few seconds, trying to process it. Then it hit him: if I hadn’t scraped the windshield with that disc, I wouldn’t have seen him. I would’ve killed him.
The thought stuck to his brain like gum flavored with shit and lime.
He barely made it home. A dull numbness settled over his body — maybe the booze, maybe the hormonal crash after the adrenaline spike.
The apartment was small and damp, smelling of unwashed clothes and bad life choices.
He tossed his jacket over a chair, sat on the bed, pulled out the coke, and did a line.
It brought him back a little. Beside him lay that silvery piece of plastic.
The CD.
He stared at it, letting the coke take over.
There were no markings. No name. No logo. Not even the tiny manufacturer codes. Like something that wasn’t meant to exist. No-name discs, he remembered. Cheap trash. Half of them couldn’t be burned, the other half couldn’t be read. He snickered.