Kaden Dunn

A former Sergeant in the US Army now turned Private Contractor, Kaden Dunn is a force to be reckoned with at the best of times. Couple that now with a burning rage deep inside of him howling to be set loose upon the world at any moment and he’s a man you do not want to be on the wrong side of; especially when the Change comes.

## Early Days

Kaden never knew his birth parents beyond the last name, having been placed into foster care as a baby and then ‘adopted’ into a home as a young boy. Foster care was not kind to Kaden, often ending up in fights or arguments with other kids which he would always claim was just him standing up for himself. As such he was shipped around a fair amount in the early days.

There was a hope that, after finding a stable home through adoption, Kaden’s temper might settle down some. And it did, for a while. The couple that had adopted him had been having trouble conceiving for the longest time, as such they’d decided to bring a child into their home. His mother, Sherry, was overjoyed at having a child in the house and paid great attention to Kaden, giving him the love he’d never known until that point. His father, James, on the other hand wasn’t so caring given that he hadn’t really been bothered about children in the first place.

Everything was good for a few years, Kaden started to do well enough in school and had avoided getting into fights for the most part. He’d even started taking up boxing and ju-jitsu as a way to harness that aggressive energy inside of him in a healthier way. Then Sherry found out she was pregnant. Of course, she was overjoyed, and Kaden himself was nervous but a little excited about the idea of having a little brother or sister to look after. Only to then find out it would be a brother AND a sister as she was expecting twins.

James had shown himself to be indifferent, mostly grumbling about the cost of raising another two children would be, but Sherry remained optimistic about it all. After the birth though, things started to change. Sherry suffered from post-partum depression, the caring and loving woman starting to drift away from Kaden by the day. As for James? He started to become angrier now himself, given he was now having to pick up the slack for three children he hadn’t even wanted in the first place.

While Sherry did eventually pull herself through, she wasn’t the same woman Kaden had known before the arrival of the twins. She was colder, more distant with him specifically. And it was hard from Kaden not to think that now she had her ‘own’ children, he was no longer wanted or needed. Even still, he loved his siblings and knew he would do anything to protect them and make them feel loved.

So, when James came home blind drunk one night and started yelling at the youngsters for making noise, Kaden stepped in. The teen was no match for a grown man, even in such a drunken state, and James beat him mercilessly. But he didn’t touch the twins and that was all Kaden could care about as he felt the boot connect with his side again and again.

What started as a one time event slowly became a pattern of behaviour. And every time James got angry at the twins or Sherry, Kaden would steal his attention to focus solely on him. He became good at hiding the evidence of the beatings. He started to withdraw from people at school. The less connections he made, the safer everyone was after all.

One day though, when Kaden was 16, it all came to a head. He’d been at boxing training and so arrived home slightly later than James that night. And the sight he found is still burned into his memory to this day. Sherry, the woman who had first shown him love and caring, who had told him many times that he was a good man and worth something, was laying motionless and cold on the floor of the kitchen; a pool of blood surrounding her from several stab wounds. Kaden remained frozen in place, staring at the woman who’d raised him now dead. Until he heard something from upstairs,

> “Daddy, what you doi-“
>
>

Kaden’s blood ran cold in that moment as the screams of his siblings echoed down the stairs and the next thing he knew he was sprinting up them in a blind rage. He found both of his siblings now silent, blood seeping from their tiny bodies. Too much. Far too much blood. And there stood James, a blood kitchen knife in his hand still. Staring at his handiwork with an almost proud look in his eye. He turned to Kaden and that look turned to disgust. He started berating the teen, yelling at him as he so often did over the years. But Kaden heard none of it.

He'd been trained for many years now in how to handle someone with a knife, and it was practically instinct that guided his hand in disarming the man before him as he swung to give Kaden the same fate as his family. Now armed with that very blade, he plunged it into James’ chest again and again and again and again… He didn’t keep count, but the police later said it was twenty times in total.

As the sirens rang, Kaden crawled over to his siblings, vison now blurry with tears as he tried desperately to get them both to wake up, to be okay. And that was how the police found him, clinging onto his siblings as if letting them go would be the reason they were dead. It took several officers to finally force him to release them and he was sedated so the ambulance could get him to a hospital to have him checked over.

The police never bothered to try and charge him with anything. Witnesses at the gym had him there when Sherry was killed, and while he openly admitted to the police about killing James, it was deemed self defence in a traumatising situation. However, he was now left without a family once more, and back into the system he went for another two years.