Farris grew up in an old mill town outside of Pittsburgh.  His parents were school teachers who couldn’t have children, so they adopted him.  He spent his whole childhood quietly wishing he had been taken in by someone more interesting.  He fantasized that his real parents were Bonnie & Clyde, vigilantes living by their wits and killing with impunity.

His adopted parents lived in the kind of quiet neighborhood that was a great place to raise a family - back when there were

jobs.  A decayed and shuttered downtown with a flourishing Wal-Mart.  The most fun a kid could have there was getting high with friends at an abandoned limestone quarry.  He loved his parents, but he always knew that he could never resign himself to their mundane lifestyle.

When he was fifteen, his mom and dad died when his father, an avid pilot after time in the Air Force as a young man, crashed their Cessna on the way back from a vacation.  When Farris woke up in the broken plane, he was pinned under it’s crushed frame, eye-to-eye with mangled bodies of his family.  He screamed in terror, before blacking out.

Hours later, when EMTs found him near the gaping fuselage, they told him it was a miracle, figuring he must have been thrown from the broken cabin during the crash and somehow survived.  Farris knew that it wasn’t a miracle that had gotten him out of the plane, though he didn’t know what exactly had happend.  After the accident, he was left with two things: A lifelong fear of flying, and a deep-seeded, haunting feeling that something evil inside him had been unleashed.

They later learned that it was a freak engine failure that caused the accident.  Something no one could have ever anticipated, which made it worse for Farris.  At least, if it had been pilot error, there would have been someone to blame, his father.  No, this wasn’t anyone’s fault.  It was random, leaving Farris with the realization, too young to handle it, that we’re all victims of blind fate.

He stopped caring about much of anything after that.  Suddenly he didn’t relate with any of the kids in town who used to be his friends.  He became quiet and withdrawn.  In foster care and state homes, he graduated high school... barely.  While most people from his class got jobs or went to school, he just took off.  He packed up his truck, and started driving on Interstate Seventy.  It wasn’t the romantic allure of the open road that got Farris to leave everything he ever knew without a second thought - he was running from something.  He wouldn’t realize from what until years later.

Farris got by working wherever would take him for a year or so, then he started running drugs.  Not selling them, mind you, just driving them.  He eventually got his Class D License, hauling hundreds of pounds of coke from Mexico.  It was the kind of work he could appreciate, he was always going somewhere even if it didn’t get him anywhere.  It was on a late night run in Tennessee that he was pulled over by a State Trooper, the end of his drug-smuggling career.

The judge, after reading his file, took pity on Farris.  He gave the kid a choice: prison time or The Army.  Farris chose the latter. 

He went to Afghanistan, where he reinvented himself.  His old life felt like a distant memory.  He made friends again.  Even had a best friend, a crazy bastard named Clint Trucks.  Farris was almost convinced that the darkness he had carried with him all of those years was something he’d imagined or gotten over, when he was captured by the Taliban.  They held him with others from his unit for days, torturing them.  At least Clint was there with him, but they didn’t know how long they could take it.

Finally, after days of abuse, the dark energy deep within Farris, the demon he always knew was there, ripped out of him.  He lashed out at his captures, and everything that had ever gone wrong in his life.  And, when he woke up, everyone was dead.  Everyone.