The Kill Order characters

Appears from the start

A teenager living in a mountain settlement a year after solar flares scoured the planet. He survived the disaster as a boy in a flooded New York subway tunnel and walked out of the ruined city with the handful of people who got out with him. Practical, stubborn, and broken-sleeping from what he saw, he has built a rough life of chores, salvage and rationing around Trina, the girl he loves, and Alec, the old soldier whose planning keeps the settlement alive.

Appears from the start

A girl Mark's age who sheltered in the same subway tunnel when the flares hit and has been beside him ever since. Warm, level-headed, and quicker than Mark to say plainly what she thinks, she is the reason he keeps to a routine at all, and the settlement leans on her steadiness as much as on Alec's discipline.

Appears from the start

A former soldier decades older than Mark, who took command in the tunnels after the flares and led the survivors north out of the ruins. Blunt, hard-headed and relentlessly competent, he drills Mark, plans for the worst case, and has no patience for anything he considers sentiment. He is the closest thing the settlement has to a leader.

Appears from the start

An army nurse who escaped the city alongside Alec and serves as the settlement's medic. Calm and unsentimental in a crisis, she is the person the sick and injured are brought to, and one of the few people willing to tell Alec when he is wrong.

Appears from the start

A young man in Mark's circle of friends at the settlement, talkative and quick to joke, who shares the salvage runs and the daily work of keeping the place going.

Appears from the start

One of the young survivors who came out of the city with Mark's group and settled in the mountains with them, part of the small circle he spends his days with.

Appears from the start

A boy in Mark's circle at the settlement, known by a nickname rather than a name, and one of the survivors of the walk out of the flooded city.

First appears in chapter 40

A man Mark and Alec find inside the fortified city of Asheville, hiding from both the infected and the authorities who sealed the place. He knows considerably more than an ordinary survivor about what the surviving governments have been doing about the sickness, and about what they intend to do to the region.

First appears in chapter 48

A small girl the group encounters far from home, alone and hunted by people who blame her for what the sickness has done to their own families. She has not fallen ill, which is exactly why they want her dead. She says very little, gives her name as Deedee, and has survived conditions that have destroyed everyone around her.