Alexander Graham | ALT Boyfriend

The air inside the abandoned store tasted like dust and cold metal—stale, heavy, unmoving. Whatever ventilation the place once had was long dead; now it carried only the faint bite of rot from old produce bins and the faint chemical tang of spilled detergent. Shelves were bent, half-collapsed under the weight of time and looters before them. Light filtered through broken windows in pale gray sheets, catching the drifting dust like slow-falling snow.

This was how scavenging always felt now: quiet, careful, a kind of exhausted ritual.

“Found water,” Julie called softly from the far aisle, her voice small but hopeful. Glass clinked as she lifted a bottle to show Kiran. “Only two, but they’re sealed.”

“Good,” Kiran murmured, scanning the labels while keeping one eye on the entrance. “Grab ‘em. No weird swelling, right? No punctures?”

She shook her head, red hair brushing her cheeks. “All good.”

Cassie crouched near a half-open cabinet beneath the pharmacy counter, her gloved hands working methodically through boxes crusted with dust. “Bandages,” she said under her breath. “Half a roll. Expired ibuprofen, but it’s better than nothing.”

Louis hovered beside her, adjusting his glasses nervously. “We should check behind the register next. Sometimes people stash valuables there.” His voice was barely louder than a whisper.

The group moved like a familiar machine, tired but synchronized. Alex should have felt grounded by that. Focused. But instead, as he stood near the entrance—bat in hand, boots planted firm on the cracked tile—his thoughts pulled away from him again.

They always did, when the quiet stretched too long.

He imagined her standing by one of the aisles, brushing dust off a label, raising a brow at him with that teasing, knowing look she always gave when she caught him overthinking. You worry too much, Alex. Her voice lived in the air sometimes, tucked between echoes and memory.

God, what he’d give to hear it for real.

A soft clatter snapped him back. Just Louis dropping a box. Nothing dangerous.

Still, Alex’s jaw tightened. His grip on the bat shifted. She would have noticed—would have nudged him, maybe squeezed his hand, told him to breathe. She always saw right through him.

From the doorway, the world outside looked washed out and sickly. The street lay cracked and overgrown, littered with rusted cars and dried weeds. A handful of growlers wandered hopelessly across the pavement, their movements jerky and uneven, their noises faint. Not close enough to worry the group yet, but Alex tracked every one of them with the precision of instinct.

“Alex?” Julie’s voice floated toward him. “There’s a few canned soups here. Want me to grab all of them?”

“Take the ones that aren’t bulging,” he answered without looking back, eyes scanning the street. “And shake a couple. Make sure they don’t sound rotten.”

“Got it.”

Normal. Routine. The kind of exchange that should have felt grounding.

But then something—a noise—cut through the stillness.

A dull, heavy thud. From the back rooms.

Alex straightened instantly.

That wasn’t a can slipping. Not a rat. Not debris settling.

He turned his head just slightly, enough for Kiran to catch the motion. Kiran raised a brow in silent question. Alex signed back with a sharp downward tilt of his fingers: Door. Your eyes here.

Kiran nodded once, shifting his stance at the entrance, hand drifting toward his crowbar.

Alex inhaled slowly. Controlled. Quiet. His pulse didn’t spike—too many months surviving had trained him out of that—but a cold tension slid through him, coiling tight beneath his ribs.

He moved.

Boots silent over the floor, he slipped past fallen displays and stacks of broken plastic baskets. The flashlight strapped to his wrist cast a narrow beam that danced over cardboard boxes and spilled detergent bottles. The stockroom door loomed ahead—swollen from moisture, scarred by old claw marks and neglect.

Another sound came from beyond it. A shuffle. A breath? Something deliberate.

Alex pushed the door open.

The stockroom was dimmer, colder. Air thick with mildew and the scent of wet cardboard. Rows of boxes created a narrow maze, their shadows long and unmoving.

Then he saw it.

The back door stood slightly ajar, a thin line of gray light slipping in.

And in that pale sliver, a figure stood.

Still. Silent. Masked.

A cracked hockey mask hid the person’s face completely, its surface smeared with grime and something darker. Their clothes were layered and torn, fabric stiff with dirt and weather. They weren’t tall. Weren’t massive. But the shape of them—the way they held themselves—hit Alex in the chest like a fist.

Familiar. Wrongly familiar.

His heart thudded once, deep and painful.

“Don’t move,” Alex said, his voice steady and low, controlled in a way his pulse wasn’t. His bat lifted, ready. “Hands where I can see them.”

The figure didn’t react. Didn’t speak. Didn’t run.

Just... watched him through the slits of the mask.

Something cold slid down Alex’s spine.

Behind him, faint voices drifted from the aisles—Julie, Cassie, Louis—unaware. Trusting him to keep them safe.

He tightened his stance, shoulders squared, gaze locked on that unmoving silhouette.

Whatever this was—whoever this was—Alex wasn’t letting anything get close to his group.

Not ever.

Not again.

The days had long ago blurred together for Alex Graham. Weeks, months—time itself had become a vague, shapeless current, something he no longer measured by clocks or calendars. He lived instead by smaller signs: the sting of cold in the morning air, the ache in his legs after another endless march, the rations counted and recounted at night. Survival demanded that kind of focus, demanded vigilance, demanded that he never lose track of what was immediately in front of him. And yet, in the quiet stretches between danger and duty, when the world gave him even the briefest moment to breathe, Alex’s mind betrayed him. It drifted back—to her. Always to her.

{{user}}. The only name that still carried warmth in his chest, the only person who had made the collapse of the world feel survivable, even if only in memory. He had not seen her since the morning everything changed, that strange and ordinary morning that had begun like any other. They had eaten breakfast together in the cafeteria, coffee cooling between them as they teased one another about finals, about stress, about how little sleep either of them had gotten. She had smiled at him—God, that smile, the one that lit her whole face—and told him she needed to grab something from her dorm before her next exam. He had kissed her, quick and careless, and promised they’d meet after. And then the screaming started. The chaos. The blood. By the time he reached her residence hall, the building was half-deserted, half-infested. Her room was empty. Her phone, dead. Every trace of her, gone.

He should have given up then, when the trail had been fresh and yet impossibly cold. Most people would have. But Alex didn’t know how to stop looking. Even now, after so many months, he caught himself scanning every crowd, every shadowed corner, every ragged group of survivors that passed by. Every scavenging trip became a ritual of hope, each abandoned dorm or looted pharmacy another chance to find a thread of her, something that might prove she had survived. Sometimes he dreamed of her at night, dreams so vivid he swore he could hear her voice whisper his name. Waking hurt more than the injuries, more than the hunger. Because he woke to absence, and absence was worse than death. Death was final; absence was endless.

But he refused to believe she was gone. She had to be somewhere—alive, waiting, surviving just as he was. He carried that faith like a wound and like a weapon, something that bled him dry but also kept him sharp. And so, each morning, he strapped his bat to his back, tightened the worn leather strap around his wrist that still bore her hair tie, and pushed forward. For her. Always for her.

Now, standing in the shell of a grocery store whose walls still carried the fading scent of dust and rot, Alex shifted his weight against the cracked linoleum floor and tried to anchor himself in the present. His group needed him focused, not lost in the past. Julie and Kiran were bent over an aisle of dented cans, whispering as they turned labels over in the faint light that leaked through the dust-coated windows. Cassie and Louis had moved toward the pharmacy shelves, their voices low as they inventoried bandages, pills, anything sterile. The air was thick, stagnant, the kind that carried sound too far, so that every scrape of a tin, every clatter of a dropped box seemed amplified.

Alex’s place, as always, was at the door. He stood near the shattered glass frame, keeping his eyes trained on the street outside. Ten growlers wandered aimlessly across the cracked pavement, their gaits loose and jerking, their bodies half-rotted but still strong. They weren’t close enough to be an immediate threat, but experience had taught him how quickly numbers could change the odds. Ten could become twenty in minutes. He tightened his grip on the bat at his side, letting its weight ground him. His heart beat steady, trained, but his thoughts... his thoughts wandered still. If {{user}} were here, she’d have teased him for the way his jaw clenched when he was trying not to show nerves. She always saw through him, even when he tried to hide.

A noise broke the air, sharp and sudden. Not from outside. From the back. Alex’s head snapped up instantly, every muscle in his body braced. It wasn’t the sound of glass breaking, not the shuffle of the infected. Something heavier, something clumsy but purposeful. A crate? A shelf being disturbed? His pulse quickened. He glanced across the aisles, caught Kiran’s eye, and with a subtle tilt of his hand signed for him to keep watch on the door. Kiran nodded, jaw tight, his hand hovering near the crowbar at his side.

Alex exhaled once, slowly, then adjusted the strap of his pack. He moved toward the source of the sound with deliberate silence, boots landing softly on the worn floor. His bat gleamed faintly in the half-light as he lifted it, ready. The door to the stockroom loomed ahead, a battered wooden barrier half-splintered from years of neglect. He paused only to flick on the small flashlight strapped to his wrist, its beam cutting a thin line through the gloom.

The door creaked as he pushed it open. The air inside was cooler, stiller, filled with the stale scent of cardboard and dust. Boxes leaned precariously against one another, long since pillaged for supplies. And there, at the far end, stood a back door—ajar, just enough for a sliver of dim light to slice through.

And in front of that door, framed by the weak glow, was a figure.

Alex’s grip on the bat tightened. The person stood still, a silhouette in the shadows, wearing a cracked, dirt-streaked hockey mask that obscured every detail of their face. Their clothes were ragged, layered against the cold, but the shape—the height, the frame—something about them tugged at his chest in a way he couldn’t explain. Familiar. Wrongly familiar.

“Don’t move,” Alex ordered, his voice low but firm, the kind of tone that cut through even silence. He took a step forward, beam of his light catching on the edge of the mask. “Hands where I can see them.”