Kaidan is a teenage boy with antisocial personality disorder.  Having grown up without a personal identity or any sense of self, Kaidan is quick to latch on to others. He needs people in his life that he can use to his own benefit. Kaidan lacks empathy; a trait that one-day may prove to be of value to him. He derives pleasure from exerting authority over others, yet lacks the forethought or responsibility to be an effective leader.  He is impulsive and largely unreliable, yet effectively exploits others to achieve his goals. People are susceptive to his charm and good looks. Though Kaidan is promiscuous and ambivalent to sexual orientation, he has no capacity for love, though he feigns it convincingly enough.

His story begins in 2003 when his father, struggling with depression, commits suicide. Kaidan feels that his father abandoned him, and feels only resentment. Kaidan’s mother Karen, lost and struggling with her grief and looking for an outlet for her pain enlists in the Army and ships out to Iraq. Kaidan again feels abandoned.

Kaidan is left in the care of his grandparents. These old fashioned, no nonsense folks are ultimately unable to cope with the burden of raising an unusually dark and deeply troubled boy. After an incident at school where Kaidan got in a fight with another boy and nearly killed him, his grandparents send him off to a home for troubled youth that effectively amounts to a psych ward with all the amenities of a prison. For the third time in his life, Kaidan is abandoned. Kaidan uses his time here to study people and learn how to both manipulate them and emulate their feelings, reactions and emotions. He becomes a skilled mimic, as is typical in people with sociopathic tendencies.

Meanwhile in Iraq, Karen is wounded by an IED and sent home with a purple heart. Her slow road to recovery includes fighting to regain the use of her legs and a nasty opiate addiction. But eventually she gets healthy enough to begin the process of getting her son back.

And than comes Zombieland...

Karen, fresh out of the hospital and running for her life finds her parents dead tracks her son down to the home for troubled youth. When she arrives she finds that the young people inside have become just as violent as the anarchists on the outside. She reaches Kaidan as he’s just taken a life for the first time.

Reunited, mother and son set out into the dystopian apocalypse to rebuild their relationship. For the most part they get along fine, as Kaidan is able to adapt to almost any situation. For him, being with the mother who abandoned him is far better than being alone in the new world. Over the course of this chapter of their lives they encounter many people together, making friends and enemies. They fight for their very survival as the world around them falls apart.

Karen and Kaidan are taken by a rogue CDC doctor and his army of enforcers. Karen is beaten and forced to find new people for the doctor to run experiments on. She finds and infiltrates the Caravan. Kaidan is left alone with the doctors. Karen leads the Caravan on an assault to rescue Kaidan. Together with the Caravan they set out and find their way to Fort Dixie.

Soon after, Kaidan and his mother part ways and Kaidan finds himself a part of a new group. They’re a group of teens who’ve banded together like post-apocalyptic Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.  Kaidan becomes the leader of these teens and, due to his mental state, turns them into a war band. He leads them to war against his mother and the friends she’s made as an act of retribution for his lifetime of abandonment. By this time Kaidan has become violent and dangerous, having killed many people with very little hesitance. He has fulfilled his destiny to become the villain.