Bloody Fucking Hell #2
He placed it on the table next to his guitar. An old instrument, scratched and worn, its neck remembering his fingers better than he did himself — the only thing he owned that was worth anything. He knew he could get at least two grand for it.
A relic, he thought. The guitar. Me. And the CD. All relics.
But who still used CDs? And how had this one ended up there? There was something defiant in its obsolescence. Something deeply, stubbornly metal.
With the last scraps of consciousness he had left, Johnny turned the polished surface of the disc toward himself, using it like a mirror.
He saw… he saw…
***
He woke before dawn, in that hour when the city isn’t breathing yet, only gagging in its sleep.
His heart hammered, trying to punch its way out of his chest. His hands were shaking.
His mouth tasted of metal, blood, and something stale, as if he’d spent the entire night sucking on rust. He sat up too fast and immediately regretted it.
His head split clean in two. His hands kept trembling.
Blood sugar crash. I need to eat something, he thought.
I need to put something in me before I fall apart completely.
And yet the very idea of food made him nauseous.
“That fucking dream…”
The images from the nightmare — one of the strangest and most terrifying he’d ever had — were already slipping away, swept out by the broom of waking consciousness, but not entirely.
Fragments remained, like scratched frames from a film someone had tried to erase.
Smears on celluloid. Ghost data on a rewritable disk.
He remembered the eyes. Fever-bright. Set too close together.
He remembered the hand — bloody, mangled, skin peeling like wet paper.
Worms crawled over it, thick, greasy, slow, each one the size of a human finger. And that hand… it was pointing.
At something. At —
The CD?
He jolted and looked around. The apartment in Banjica.
His apartment. His lair. The same walls, the same wardrobe with the crooked doors, the same stain on the ceiling shaped like a Dunlop Tortex pick with a V-peak.
There was no creature. No worms. Just him, in his underwear, hungover, alive.
Okay — maybe a cockroach or two if you went looking, but those didn’t scare him.
The car. Fuck.
It all came crashing back like a slap to the face: the accident, the bum, the ice, the CD, the firing, the band, the girl — everything in one night.
He’d lost it all in the most horrifying three hours of his life.
As if someone had decided to ram Eddie’s clenched fist down his throat just to see if he’d break.
“What did I do to deserve this?” he muttered, sounding pathetic even to himself.
The bathroom mirror showed no mercy. He stared at himself for a long time, trying to recognize the face coming apart in front of him.
He used to look like Dave Mustaine. Used to.
That wild mane of light-blond hair had been his pride, proof he was still here, that he hadn’t crossed over into the ranks of men with buzz cuts and tucked-in shirts stretched over beer bellies.
Now the mane was thinner. Sparse. A bald spot was already forming at the crown — that particular betrayal only men know, the kind that arrives quietly and stays forever. Soon he’d have to tie it back, pretend it was a choice and not a defeat.
The thought made him shudder.
He needed a fix. Not coke. Not that shit. Not again. Something else. Something that would lift him up, carry him skyward.
Heroin.
“No, no, my friend,” he said out loud, still staring at his reflection. “You’re not trading one mule for another.” He tried to smile. It came out as a grimace. In the mirror he saw his bleeding gums. His teeth were already starting to give up.
“Great. Now that too,” he muttered. “What a wreck of a man.”
He stood there a while longer, soaking in the warm swamp of self-pity.
He thought of Smederevo. Of his father. Of his first guitar — a used, patched-up, pathetic Strandberg knockoff, but his.
He remembered the way his dad used to watch him play, that look that said I have no idea what you’re doing, but I can see it matters to you. I can see you’re good at it.
Too bad my old man died when I was fifteen, he thought.
After that, he’d had to fend for himself.
The guitar kept him afloat. The streets.
School. His first band. At nineteen, still a kid, he joined a Smederevo metal band called Psychoparadox.
They had a couple of good years. He quit when the Brankovi? brothers decided to go commercial.
They went on to form a band called Alogia and found success — whatever success means in Serbia — while he kept drifting.
He moved to Belgrade and started his own band.
Bloody Fucking Hell.
Bloody fucking indeed.
Then came ten years of everything and nothing — temp jobs, constant gigs, even more constant drugs with the rest of the scene rats.
Ten years of nothing. Now he was a broke thirty-something, approaching forty like a brick wall.
Kids looked at him like a relic. Once, bars would let him drink on credit. Not anymore.
“But I can still play,” he said quietly, clenching his fist. “I still can.”
The words rang hollow. He looked around. The CD lay on the living room floor. He didn’t remember putting it there. It was just there, as if the apartment itself had pushed it into the open. He stared at it with disgust.
“I’ll throw you in the trash,” he said. “Where you belong.”
He bent down to pick it up. The moment he touched it something ran through his arm. Not electricity. Not cold. Something deeper. A vibration that came straight out of the dream. Out of the nightmare.
He closed his eyes. For a moment, everything was calm. He opened them again and dropped the disc as if it had burned him.
“What the hell is this now?” he muttered.
He sat on the couch, breathing deeply. Get a grip. Is this what a nervous breakdown looks like? He wasn’t sure.
That’s when he finally decided. It’s not the end of the world, he told himself. I’ll sell the guitar. I’ll get a job. I’ll play whatever I have to. Softer rock. Pop. Eighties Yugoslav hits. I’ll play even the cheesiest, corniest songs at working-class weddings — WHATEVER IT TAKES. I’ll survive.
The CD lay on the floor, silent, patient, offering something else. But what?
“What if…” he said to himself, then fell quiet. He picked it up again, cautiously. Turned it toward the light. The plastic was scratched, sure — but not randomly. The lines carried some deeper meaning.
“No way,” he muttered.
He opened the stereo system — old, but reliable, a Pioneer XR-A660. The CD player still worked. With a strange sense of reverence, he placed the disc inside.
He pressed play.
At first, there was silence. Not ordinary silence, but something more like an overture, threaded with faint noise and distant whimpers. Then —
A tone.
Deep. Low. Dirty.
It was fucking metal.
***
Instrumental. No intro. No warning. As if someone had simply kicked open the gates of hell and let the sound spill out.
The riff hit him straight in the chest. It was perfect.
Not technically perfect — necessary. Every note sat exactly where it belonged.
The palm muting was tight, precise, alive.
The drums pounded like the opening salvos of a demonic invasion.
The bass breathed beneath it all, striking the right strings deep in his gut.
There was no doubt about it — this was the strongest, hardest, most uncompromising music he had ever heard. Exactly the kind of music he had always wanted to play himself.
Johnny sat frozen, stunned. “What the… fuck…” he whispered.
The music grew, accelerated, intensified, evolved.
The transitions were brilliant above all because they were unpredictable.
As if someone knew exactly how he thought and what he felt — only faster, sharper, hitting every exposed nerve.
Johnny realized he’d pissed himself. Not just that — he was hard. Rigid, like a spear.
Jesus Christ, I got a hard-on from sound, he thought, exhilarated.
He rose like a machine, crossed the room, and cranked the amp.
What happened after that he couldn’t remember clearly.
He must have been listening for hours, because the play of light and shadow on the walls of his apartment had faded into a peripheral flicker.
He didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He just listened.
The music kept him awake, clean, focused.
It was a pure drug. As if someone were rinsing his brain of every unnecessary thought — carefully, tenderly.
“This…” he said softly. “This is me.”
When one track ended, the next began. And then the next. There were no pauses. No mistakes. The disc kept spinning — that scratched piece of plastic — drilling a hole straight through his soul.
Johnny cried. Johnny laughed.
Somewhere deep inside him, something twisted — not fear, not joy. Something else.
That something knew — before Johnny admitted it to himself — that there was no way back.
It was like receiving a gift from heaven.
Except the gift had teeth. It gnawed at him from the inside, drained him.
Johnny stopped keeping track of time. Days melted into nights, nights into the sticky, blurred hours between sleep and waking.
He ate just enough not to pass out. Crackers.
A few bites of bread. Sometimes instant soup, diluted to the point of insult.
He lost weight rapidly; his face tightened over his skull, his eyes grew too large for the delicate bones of his cheekbones.
His beard grew wild, and greasy strands of hair hung in his face.