Apocalypse, With Peaches Part 1

The water pulsed again, one sudden blip of pressure, sharp as a snapped rubber band, then settled back into its usual stream as though it hadn’t just made Simplicity Grace want to commit a federal crime against plumbing.

She blinked once, slowly. The mirror was fogged, and in it, her reflection looked like a woman someone had described over a bad radio signal. Her blonde hair clung to her neck, damp and a little confused. Her face looked like it had been trying on emotions during the night and forgot to pick one by morning.

“Fuck you,” she whispered, staring at the faucet.

The faucet, being a veteran of The Hollowing, had no comment.

It dropped again, just a beat, then resumed, like it was playing a little game. Or remembering a time when things worked.

She sighed. The kind of sigh people used to give customer service reps in the Beige Years, back when there were call centers and refunds and small luxuries like functioning infrastructure. Back when hot water didn’t need coaxing and reboots like a sullen home interface.

“Well,” she muttered. “That’s just not helpful.”

The bathroom was small, the air thick with steam and the memory of last night’s dream, which still clung to her thoughts like cobwebs on lace. The yellow dress had been so vivid. She’d seen herself crossing the cracked city streets in it, sunlight bouncing off her shoulders. Her basket had been full of food, real food, not the canned slurry or powdered grief most people ate now. She was smiling. She was going to see him.

Sylas.

He’d looked thin in the dream. Not pitiful, just underfed. Not in a way food could fix exactly. In the way people get when they’ve been back.

You bring food to people you claim. You don’t show up like some rude door-to-door prophet of feelings without a casserole or a hot loaf of bread.

The water stuttered again. She turned it off entirely, then stood there dripping, arms crossed. Her mind was still caught on his face. The way his eyes had looked, not cold, but distant. Like someone watching the world through a window that used to be a door.

She picked up the towel. The yellow dress was still folded neatly on the chair by the door.

She already knew where she was going.

And she was going to figure out why his eye sockets were bleeding.

Because that was just not sustainable.

The world outside hummed like it was pretending to be alive. The sky wasn’t gray so much as bruised. Buildings leaned like tired drunks, and the pavement had stopped pretending it was solid. Still, Simplicity walked with that polite, ballerina-adjacent bounce that said nothing out here is scary unless I decide it is.

She wore the yellow dress. The dream had been very clear. It had puffed sleeves and tiny embroidered daisies along the hem and a pocket that once held a handkerchief she’d stitched a smiley face onto. Today, it held a fork. Just in case.

Her basket swayed on her arm, covered with a white cloth. Underneath was a mix of real and almost-real food, a barter-bought loaf of bread, a packet of instant soup with a questionable label, and a can of peaches she’d been saving since her last birthday. This was special. He was going to be her person. And she thought peaches were a good way to say that without being forward.

The Hollowing hadn’t made people dangerous. It had made them tired. Curled-in-on-themselves, burnt-paper tired. No war, no bang. Rather, the slow, grinding undoing of systems and the soft shrug of collapse.

It had started with money. It usually does.

First the markets fell. Then the jobs. Then the roads, the power grids, the safety inspections. Then the hope. Everything kept moving, sort of, like a broken carousel that wouldn’t quite stop. But by the time Sylas died, everyone had already quietly agreed that maintenance was a thing of the past.

That was the Hollowing. It arrived without plagues or bombs, through the soft unraveling of a place that used to be a world. The Hollowing had started after the Neural Grid crash. The satellites blinked out, and silence settled over the sky like a warning that didn’t come in time.

Simplicity liked to call it The Beige Years instead, because if you were going to survive the death of civilization, you might as well mock its aesthetic choices.

“Everything turned tan and sad,” she’d once said to a stray cat. “Like society got really into minimalism and then forgot what joy was.”

The cat hadn’t disagreed.

The bunker sat behind a fence half-swallowed by a tree. The gate was open, which meant he was awake. Or, at least, not trying to keep anyone out.

She paused. Straightened her skirt. Patted her hair down with both hands.

Then she knocked.

Three soft raps. Cheerful, like someone about to deliver cookies to a neighbor.

Inside, a wrench hit the floor with a metallic clang. A muttered curse. Footsteps.

Then the door creaked open, and Sylas stood there.

He looked dead. Not in a smelly, rotting, decomposing way, thank heavens, but in the way a shadow might look if it got up and tried to file taxes.

His eyes were dark. Not naturally. Blood-dark. Like someone hollowed them out and replaced them with regret. His shirt was black, smudged with grease, and his hands were wrapped in cloth like he’d fought a blender and lost.

He blinked at her. A slow, owlish sort of blink.

She beamed.

“Hello,” she said brightly. “I brought soup, which says ‘I’m thoughtful,’ and peaches, which say ‘this is fate.’ Pie would’ve been too aggressive.”

He stared at her.

A single trickle of blood began to weep from his left eye socket.

“Oh no,” she said, already stepping inside. “That will not do.”

He stared at her.

He hadn’t spoken to a living human in sixteen days. Not unless you counted the man on the radio who read weather reports like he was narrating the end of time, which Sylas did not, because that guy was definitely a pre-recorded loop or a ghost with a schedule.

He was working on a toaster when she knocked. Not because he needed toast, but because the toaster had stopped humming properly. Machines had sounds, and they were all talking, and if he could keep them all calm, maybe his mind wouldn’t try to climb out of his skull and scream into the dust.

That’s what he did now. Fixed things. Toasters. Radios. Occasionally, the door.

It used to be wires on rooftops. Power lines and industrial panels and safety gear with missing parts. He’d been a technician before the Hollowing, before everything leaned and never stood up again. Twenty-one, not enough years under his belt to deserve tragedy, but just enough to fall through a rusted scaffold because someone skipped the inspection.

They said he was supposed to survive.

He didn’t.

At least, not the first time.

He remembered the silence. The cold. And the feeling of being peeled away from himself.

Then a mistake.

Not his, theirs.

Wherever he’d gone, something there had realized he wasn’t meant to stay. He’d heard the words, even now, like static across the back of his thoughts.

“Oh. Not you. Not yet.”

And then he’d woken up with blood in his eyes and nothing in his chest but noise.

Then the knock. Soft. Rhythmic. Friendly.

He flinched. Knockers were rarely friendly.

Then the voice.

And just like that, his brain threw up its arms and left the room.

She was bright. And yellow. And smiling with the confidence of someone who’d never been denied a damn thing in her life. She stepped into the bunker like it wasn’t a rusted-out metal coffin housing a man who had technically died seven years ago.

Sylas watched her with the wide, uncertain stare of someone encountering a particularly talkative raccoon holding a balloon.

“Your eye’s bleeding,” she said, setting a basket down on the table without asking. “That seems unideal. Sit down. I’ll get a cloth.”

He didn’t move. He was still processing her sentence structure.

She disappeared into the tiny kitchen nook like she had been there before, like she lived here, and returned with one of his rags. Clean-ish. Folded. Applied gently to his face.

Sylas blinked. The blood kept leaking. Her hand was warm. Her face, entirely untroubled.

He hated this part. The slow trickle from the corner of his eye. It didn’t hurt anymore, it just happened. Like a nosebleed, but worse. More personal.

His body had never quite figured out whether it was alive or not. It worked. Mostly. But sometimes it remembered the fall. Sometimes it remembered that it was not supposed to be here.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” she said. “It’s not safe for you.”

"I'm,” he started, then stopped. Tried again. “I’m not really people.”

“Oh hush,” she said. “You’re just a little broken.”

He felt something click in his chest. A mechanical, metaphorical sound, like a gear that had not moved in years suddenly realizing it was not locked after all.

She smiled again. It was not flirtatious. It was not calculated. It was just sure.

“I brought peaches,” she said. “Also bread. And a weird soup packet I don’t trust. But I figure if we share it, maybe it won’t kill us.”

He stared at her, this woman in yellow who had walked into his bunker like it was a bakery and claimed him like he was a day-old scone. He thought about telling her to leave. He considered warning her about the things he didn’t know how to fix, inside himself, in the world, in the way time sometimes blinked and skipped and left him behind.

He thought about saying I died once, you know. Someone brought me back and didn’t check the warranty.

But he said nothing.

Because really, what would that change?

So he sat down instead. Because apparently that’s what you do when someone walks into your apocalypse and sets the table.

And because the peaches smelled amazing.

Simplicity arranged the table like it was tea time and not, in fact, the inside of an aging steel bunker that smelled vaguely like burnt dust and existential dread.

She found two plates, mismatched, chipped, but clean. She placed the bread in the center like a centerpiece. Opened the can of peaches with an efficiency Sylas didn’t expect. He was still watching her like he was waiting for the punchline.

“You don’t talk much,” she said, passing him a spoon.

“You don’t ask much,” he replied, a little more surprised than annoyed.

“I already know everything important,” she said. “You're kind. You're lonely. You’re undead, which is inconvenient but manageable. And you’re very, very tired.”

Sylas opened his mouth. Closed it. He was, unfortunately, all of those things.

She scooped peaches onto his plate like she was portioning out the contents of a sacred text. “I dreamed about you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “The kind of dream that sticks. It told me you’d be mine. And when I woke up, I believed it. So here I am.”

He stared at the peaches.

“I also dreamed about snakes in hats,” she added. “But I don’t think that part was prophetic.”

A beat of silence. Then, despite himself, Sylas snorted.

The sound surprised them both.

Simplicity beamed. “There he is.”

He shook his head, but there was a trace of a smile lurking behind his otherwise shell-shocked expression. He picked up the spoon. Ate a peach. It was good. Unreasonably so.

“This is insane,” he muttered.

She nodded. “Oh yes.”

“You’re insane.”

“Debatable.”

He ate another bite. She buttered a piece of bread with a small, absurdly ornate knife she pulled from her dress pocket like it was perfectly normal to keep cutlery in your clothes.

“I’m going to stay here for a while,” she said.

“Why.”

“Because you’re not okay, and I can fix that.”

He nearly choked. “I’m not, I don’t think I can be fixed.”

“Oh,” she said, chewing delicately. “That’s fine. Then I’ll just be here while you aren’t.”

She said it so easily. Like staying with someone broken was no more complicated than sitting through a mild rainstorm. Like she had already decided to keep the umbrella up for both of them.

The metal walls of the bunker groaned softly, reacting to the outside world or maybe just the weight of her presence. Sylas wiped at his left eye and stared down at the blood on his fingers. He didn’t comment. Neither did she.

She just passed him a napkin, finished her bite of bread, and then reached across the table to very gently fix the angle of his collar.

“There,” she said. “Much better.”

And with that, she returned to her food like nothing unusual had happened.

Sylas wasn’t sure if he was terrified or comforted. Probably both.

But he didn’t ask her to leave.

The next morning, Sylas woke up to the sound of humming.

This was unusual for several reasons.

He did not own anything that hummed cheerfully.

He did not hum.

He did not allow cheerful people in his home.

Yet here it was. Clear as static-free signal. Someone humming a melody with no real tune, just the rise and fall of a content mind trying to pass the time. It echoed off the bunker walls like sunlight in a bottle.

He sat up slowly. His neck cracked. His ribs creaked. He wiped his eyes on reflex and checked his fingers. No blood. Progress.

The humming got louder. Accompanied now by the sound of organizing.

He shuffled into the main room, bare feet cold on the concrete floor.

Simplicity Grace was in his kitchen.

Wearing the same yellow dress (maybe she owned several, was that a uniform), her hair tied back with a blue ribbon that hadn’t been there yesterday. She was rearranging his shelves. Alphabetizing cans. Lining up mismatched mugs like they were going to be judged in a pageant.

“Morning!” she chirped. “I made a list of things we need. Do you know anyone who sells nutmeg?”

He blinked. Once. Twice. “You’re still here.”

“I said I was staying.”

“You didn’t say overnight.”

“Well,” she said, turning to him with a smile like a sunrise that refused to take no for an answer, “you didn’t ask me to leave.”

He stared at her. She stared back, guileless. Then turned and began neatly stacking his toolkit by size.

“You’re reorganizing my tools.”

“They were in the wrong order.”

“There is no right order.”

“There is now,” she said, and handed him a wrench. “Good morning.”

He stood there, holding the wrench like a man who had just been handed a live snake and told it was a family heirloom.

“Do you want toast?” she asked. “The toaster’s still a little sad, but I gave it a pep talk and I think it’s responding well.”

Sylas opened his mouth to say No, I don’t want toast, I want to understand how you have completely colonized my bunker in under 24 hours. But instead, he just nodded and said, “Sure.”

Because what else was he supposed to do?

The toast popped up five minutes later, slightly burned on one side and weirdly warm in the middle. She handed it to him on a paper towel with a look of intense pride, like she had just reanimated a corpse and taught it to tap dance.

“I’m going to clean the wiring closet next,” she said, biting into her own toast. “It smells like abandonment.”

Sylas took a bite of toast. Chewed. Swallowed. Blinked.

“Do you just do this? Everywhere you go?”

She tilted her head. “What, organize things?”

“No. Move in. Take over. Start fixing people.”

Her face didn’t change. But her eyes softened.

“Only when they’re broken,” she said. “And only if they look like they’ve been waiting for someone to notice.”

Sylas stared at her for a long time. Then he put down his toast, walked into the hallway, and shut himself in the radio room.

He sat in the dark and let the walls hum around him.

There was something about her.

Something unbearable.

Something terrifying.

Something warm.

And worst of all, something permanent.

The radio room had always been his escape hatch. A windowless box full of wires and buttons and static, where no one asked him questions, touched his stuff, or looked at him like they’d seen his soul and decided it just needed curtains.

But now, even in the dark, he could hear her out there.

Whistling.

Whistling. Who whistles in a bunker?

She was folding something. Or sweeping. He could hear the swish of fabric, the occasional clatter of objects being relocated. Each sound was a polite little intrusion into his solitude. Like she was redecorating his trauma.

He sat down in his usual chair. Ran a hand through his hair. Realized he’d forgotten to breathe. Or maybe he didn’t need to anymore. Hard to tell these days.

A knock on the door.

Soft. Three taps. Cheerful. Of course.

“Not now,” he called, more gently than he meant to.

The door opened anyway.

She poked her head in. “I found socks.”

He blinked. “Okay?”

“They’re yours,” she clarified, stepping in. “But you had them in a drawer labeled ‘miscellaneous screws’ so I’m not entirely sure if you knew that.”

She walked in like she owned the place, which she apparently now did, and handed him a pair of socks. Gray, a little holey, warm from wherever she had been keeping them.

Her fingers brushed his.

His entire nervous system lit up like faulty Christmas lights. Not that she noticed. Or if she did, she was too polite to say anything.

She was still smiling.

“I also found your old jacket. The leather one. It smells like old gasoline, but I put it over the chair by your bed.”

“Thanks?” he said, because he had no other scripts prepared for this situation.

She tilted her head. “Are you alright?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not alright. I’m undead. That’s generally considered a disqualifying factor for being alright.”

Her brow furrowed like he had told her the toaster was sad again.

“Well, we’ll just have to redefine alright, then.”

She sat down next to him. Too close. Not in a seductive way. In a this is just where I fit now kind of way. Her thigh touched his. Her perfume smelled like lemon balm and wet grass.

He could feel the heat of her skin like a sunlamp for whatever frozen part of his chest still thought it had a heartbeat.

He turned his head slightly. She was looking at him.

“Your eyes are bleeding again,” she whispered.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

She leaned in. Gently wiped at the corner of his eye with her thumb.

He didn’t move.

Her thumb lingered a second too long. Her eyes met his. Still gentle. Still warm. But underneath that, something aware. Something very aware.

“You’re very pretty,” she said softly.

His brain seized. “What?”

“You heard me,” she said. “You’re very pretty. You have those sad, haunted cheekbones. It’s a whole thing.”

He wanted to say something scathing. Something dry. Something to put space back between them.

Instead, he said, “You shouldn’t be saying that to someone like me.”

She smiled like someone who had already won an argument you didn’t know you were having.

“I say what I mean,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”

She stood up. Tugged the hem of her dress. Walked toward the door.

Halfway there, she looked over her shoulder and said, in the lightest, most offhanded tone imaginable,

“You’re also very, very sexy.”

And then she left the room.

Sylas sat there, completely still, sock still clutched in one hand, blood slowly welling in one eye socket.

“What the fuck,” he whispered.