Jackmier is a man who's face and appearance matches his personality. A scrawny, dare-say unhealthily thin man with rather greasy shoulder-length black hair. His bright green beady eyes gleam with ambition, jealousy, greed, and pride to boot.

Jackmier tells no one of his life prior to the convoy, and some of the younger members of the convoy believe that perhaps there was no Jackmier prior to convoy. However, the reality of his past is far more twisted and contorted.

Born to a prostitute for a mother and a father associated with both the East German Stasi and the early Russian mafia. The little he ever saw of his father more often than not involved a short but effective beating and a new set of stitches. The little joy he found out of life came from the animals on his block, especially the stray cats. However, it wasn't the comfort of their purrs that Jackmier enjoyed, it was their yelps as he poked and prodded them with kitchen utensils he'd steal in the morning. Pain was a interest to the young Jackmier, the reactions of mammals to it was a beautiful and intense emotion. Often he'd record in his journal what types of pain animals reacted to the loudest, more violently, and what pain brought the quickest fatality.

As a youthful and equally twisted teen, Jackmier followed in his father's footsteps; first associating with the smaller street gangs and eventually joining his father at the meeting place of the budding Lazanov Family. This slow rise into organized crime gave the young Jackmier meaning, a purpose and place in the ever-changing world around him. He quickly found his place as a field medic and occasionally 'information gatherer' for the family. This was where he found his calling as a surgeon. At all hours of the night Jackmier would be woken by a loud bang on the door, often his own father, and would get straight to work on stitching a new knife-wound, or removing a bullet using only a pair of tweezers and a large bottle of alcohol to dull his patients pain.

Then the wall came down... Mass immigration out of the East and into Western Europe and North America, and the collapse of any uncorruptable law enforcement was a dream come true for the Russian mafia, including the Lazanovs. With a growing power-base at home, Don Gobarik Lazanov gained contacts in North America, specifically New York. With the mass immigration, plenty of illegal Europeans were able to enter the United States, including Jackmier. With a final, firm, handshake with his father he left Germany and Europe for the first and last time. One year later his father would be arrested during a heist gone south in Romania, with no contact again with his son.

Life in New York wasn't much different than East Berlin or any other city Jackmier had spent time in. He continued his life as a surgeon on the Black Market and continued his association with the Lazanov Family in both fixing (and causing) broken bones and limbs. However, in 1998 he encountered what would become his addiction... Ether. A short-lived drug of the 1970s, ether was often used as a general anesthetic in North America, and would become one of the items the now middle-aged Jackmier would use on his patients and himself.

Then the dead began to rise... Within days of what the religious and devout called the apocalypse New York City fell. Chaos filled the streets as both the undead and looters began hunting down those who hadn't fled the city in the initial breakdown. Only through his few remaining and living contacts did Jackmier get out of New York and travel north, towards Vermont. The rest, as they say, is history...