IN A WORLD RULED BY THE DEAD,
Name: Malcolm “Mal” Kalsi
Species: Human
Age: 27
Gender: Cis-male
Faceclaim: Shazad Latif
Position: Engineer
WE ARE FORCED TO START LIVING.
In life, there are few guarantees. The only thing you could count on, the only thing that always remained true about life, was that one day it would end. That was the philosophy Malcolm Kalsi was raised on. Paranoid and easily influenced by dark news stories and conspiracy theories, Mal’s father, Aamir, constantly believed the world to be ending. He passed his teachings on to his children, constantly informing both Mal and his sister that the world would end one day and preparing them for the aftermath.
Young and impressionable, both siblings took their father’s words to heart entirely. While Mal’s sister prepared to the extent that she believed herself ‘ready’ for the end of the world, Mal found himself terrified of what it might entail. Where his sister was a fighter, training constantly so that she was physically skilled in combat, Mal was a more intellectual man, focusing more on learning and taking in new information.
Despite their differences, Mal and his sister were close. Mal knew that, when the apocalypse came, he’d have his sister at his side. It wasn’t as good as being utterly prepared himself, a fact his father reminded him of constantly, but it was something. And, in the meantime, Mal could prepare in his own ways. He went to college on a scholarship, honing his intelligence and studying engineering. He learned how to work with generators, learned how to repair cars and other things that might be useful when the world finally ended. He excelled in his field, his determination to prove to his father that he could be worth something even without his sister’s physical prowess driving him forward.
By the time he graduated from college, Mal had no shortage of job offers. He took one as a government contractor, figuring that being close to the government would provide him with ample warning when the apocalypse came. After all, if anyone knew about the end of the world, it was going to be the people in charge of it. Mal kept in close contact with his family as he worked, even on days when he went straight from his office to his bed. It was another aspect of his father’s survivalist training --- if you wanted to save someone, you had to know where they were at all times.
It was because of this close contact that Mal received news of his father’s illness immediately after he was diagnosed. His sister called him from the hospital sounding exhausted and explained that their father was sick and that the diagnosis was a terminal one. There was a bitter rivalry about it; Aamir had spent his entire life preparing for the end of the world, expecting the apocalypse to kill him, and instead of suffering through it, he’d die of mundane causes. Mal was heartbroken at the news, knowing that he’d never be able to prove his usefulness to his father before the man’s death. Desperate to prove something, he threw himself into his work with even more intensity.
Thanks to his newfound drive, Mal rose through the ranks at his employer quickly, and with his reputation preceding him, his firm was requested for more and more government work with Mal specifically requested for the jobs. He learned to listen to the people around him, to take in what they said and learn from it. It was because of this that he learned about a plan to unleash a virus that was designed to thin the herd of poor people throughout the country. Mal knew enough about the world’s end to recognize it when he saw it. Aware that there was no way the plan could end well, he sent word to his sister to begin preparing in earnest with little explanation as to why. His sister, accustomed to such warnings from their father, followed it without question.
On the day the apocalypse finally happened, Mal and the Kalsi family should have been ready. They’d been preparing for this very event for years, had a few weeks warning. But Mal learned that there was a difference in knowing something was going to happen and actually seeing it occur. The zombies were terrifying, and in the short trip to his father’s house, he witnessed more death than he’d ever imagined before.
When he finally made it to his father’s house, there was no one there. A note left by his sister on the counter indicated that their father’s disease had progressed with unexpected speed, and he’d been rushed to the hospital. Desperate to find his family, Mal went to the hospital only to find it overrun, having largely been ground zero for the virus. With the waves of undead pouring from the doors, Mal had no time to search for his father or his sister but, in his heart, he knew it wouldn’t have mattered. No one, not even someone as prepared as his family, could have survived the sheer number of zombies that overtook the building.
Unable to save his family, Mal dedicated himself to saving his friends instead. He searched the city until he found his friends, and he stuck with them until they’d all found a safe place to stay. With his best friend taking on the role of leader, Mal threw himself into anything and everything engineering, sharing his father’s training with his new groupmates as well. He may have lost his chance to prove himself to his father, but Mal is determined to make up for it by proving himself to everyone else.