N A M E: Jane Thayer
A G E: 33
P L A C E O F O R I G I N: Sweetwater, Tennessee
G R O U P: South High School
O C C U P A T I O N: Hunter
F C: Evangeline Lilly
❝ You can be something else, something distant, sharp as the stars. ❞
↪ p e r s o n a l i t y ;
P O S I T I V E T R A I T S: quick witted ; resourceful
N E G A T I V E T R A I T S: reclusive ; aloof
L I F E B E F O R E T H E O U T B R E A K:
The only child of Michael and Anne Thayer, Rebecca Jane was born in the small town of Sweetwater, Tennessee. Her father was a police officer and his brother was a Baptist minister. Her mother, on the other hand, was an elementary school teacher. Which more or less meant that the tiny Thayer family was small-town royalty. Everyone knew them and everyone liked them. But there was a nasty, unspoken truth that everyone in Sweetwater preferred to turn a blind eye to, if they knew about it at all. Michael, Jane’s father, was an alcohol, and abusive when he was drunk. He frequently physically abused his wife when he’d been drinking a little too much. Jane got off easier with him. Sometimes he leered at her, but he never hit her. During her school years, Jane was a popular girl. Her family name helped in that regard, but she was also sociable. During junior high and high school, she ran track and field. She was homecoming queen three separate years, and prom queen her senior year of high school. She had a scholarship to Vanderbilt University and planned to study medicine. But things all fell apart the summer between her high school graduation and her freshman year of college. On Independence Day, her father got drunk. He’d never physically abused Jane before, but her mother was gone grocery shopping that afternoon and the two of them were left alone. He hit her, dragged her into his bedroom and threw her onto his bed, and was fumbling at the buckle of his belt when Jane noticed the gun on his nightstand. He’d taught her to shoot it when she was younger. She reached for it blindly in panic, and without thinking, she shot and killed her father. No matter the circumstances, whether it could be passed off as self-defense or not, Jane knew how her trial would go if she was arrested. Her father had been a well-liked police officer in a small town, the brother of a minister… No one would want to believe the truth of who he really had been, and she would be charged with murder for it if she stayed. So she ran, and became a fugitive before she ever got the chance to go to college like she’d always planned. For years, Jane went from town to town and alias to alias, picking up any job that only required a high school degree and wouldn’t run a background check. She was working on a horse ranch in the suburbs of Cheyenne years later when she was finally caught and arrested. There had been media coverage for weeks of a virus that was supposedly causing the dead to reanimate, but it wasn’t anything Jane had taken seriously. Until she encountered one of the undead herself.
L I F E D U R I N G T H E O U T B R E A K:
The outbreak was ultimately what saved Jane from prison. Handcuffed in the back of a police car, she was being transported to the Corrections Department in Cheyenne when one of the undead wandered into the road. The officer driving swerved to avoid what he believed to be just another person, but he hit the infected anyway. He stopped and got out, already calling on his radio for an ambulance. Jane watched in horror from the back window of the patrol car as he was bitten and, too confused to defend himself, began to be devoured. Although she was still handcuffed, she struggled out of the car and stumbled into a nearby forest. Jane vomited and wept, but she’d been on the run so long that it never occurred to her to stay in the area long enough to be arrested again. She broke into a house on the outskirts of the city and picked the lock of her handcuffs. The house appeared to be abandoned, but she didn’t stay long enough to find out. That was the day that things got truly bad in Cheyenne, and everyone had bigger things to worry about than a woman convicted of murder in Tennessee more than a decade ago.
L I F E A F T E R T H E O U T B R E A K:
The city was in chaos. Jane stayed only because she had nowhere else to go, especially with the undead wandering. She took shelter in one abandoned home after another until she learned of a camp in the nearest high school. She went there alone, and did her best to start blending into the small community of survivors without revealing anything about her past. Jane has been a part of the camp in South High School ever since. She still doesn’t consider anyone a close friend, and still hasn’t told anyone anything about her life before the outbreak. Luckily for her, working as a hunter makes her aloofness rather easy. She leaves the camp to spend days at a time alone, and when she returns, most would rather ask her about her trip out of camp than her childhood. The undead are infinitely more interesting than plain Jane Thayer.
JANE THAYER is played by CHRISTA. (21 ; she/her ; EST)
