[attr="class","ozappcont"]
Positive: Resourceful, charming, suave, a skilled actor, logical, meticulous, eloquent, persuasive, shrewd and subtle.

Negative: Wrathful, rash, grudging, amoral, calculating, cold, tender hearted though he tries not to be, deceptive, enigmatic, envious and callous.


Triads. Mob families. The Yakuza. All Hollywood exaggerations right? Nobody actually lived that way, not now at least, right? Wrong. Just because Hollywood popularised it and left every street corner punk in every city thinking he or she was a part of all of that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It was still there, most had just gotten wise and kept what they were up to below the radar. Nobody went around calling themselves wise guys and bragging about their criminal enterprises. If they did they soon learned that it was a one way ticket to a jail cell, a bullet or, shitting you not, the witness protection program, which was anything but, and a life on the run.

Silence was a lesson Jimmy Maddox and his boys learned right back in the 1920s. Tired of Capone and his hold on Chicago Jimmy got himself out. He travelled south to family, ending up practically ruling the docks in New Orleans just a couple of years later. His boys would take over the family ‘business’ when he got too old to keep a slippery grip on it and it was into that grey world of smuggling and illegality that Malcolm and his wife Mae would eventually bring two kids sixty years after Jimmy had bolted from Chicago. As the first born son, the mantle Malcolm bore heavier than either of his younger brothers, Grey would eventually be expected to take up his place at his father’s right hand shoulder. An eventual boss to the gang, a man to be respected, a man expected to keep the crown and the slippery hold on their corner of New Orleans’ criminal niche.

Grey was familiar with it all before he even hit elementary school. He’d grown up in the hallowed halls of their French quarter pile, accompanying his dad on his ‘errands’ while Mae wrung her hands at home. She hadn’t grown up in the life, not in the way Malcolm had and as she’d later learn was rightfully worried about her husband and her boy. Grey was perfectly safe, the slippery shield that allowed everything to bounce off of his father extending to him. Even if it hadn’t the families who ruled what was pretty much New Orleans’ underworld had rules about this things – you didn’t touch the kids. If Malcolm had known then that the rule was more a ‘guideline’, especially for those encroaching on the docks and his monopoly, he would’ve stamped them all out, left the unrecognisable parts rotting in the bayou like so many others.

Five when his mother had become pregnant again, Grey had been told by his dad that he was gonna be expected to watch out for the little sister who was coming. That was as much his duty as the work was. Women were to be protected, taken care of. His face serious Grey had nodded, even if he didn’t understand much of it. He was gonna be a big brother, that was enough. Months later, there was a commotion in the middle of the night, his father coming in to bundle him up and buckle him into the back of the car. His ma was in the front, yelping, red faced in a way that had him panicking until his dad told him they were just heading to the hospital, it was time for his sister to be born. They rushed in ten minutes later, him on his dad’s hip, thrust unceremoniously off onto his uncle Connor when he appeared only minutes later. He and Uncle Connor sat in the hallway for hours, him dozing on and off, before his dad had appeared, all smiles and cigars. They had a daughter, perfectly healthy, just as pretty as her ma.

Babies were loud, messy too, but Grey did as his dad asked and watched out for her all the same. For the next two years he doted on his sister, encouraged her when she started crawling, got her walking after him and eventually chasing him around the house. He taught her the first word that would bubble out of her mouth – Ga – Grey. It was idyllic, at least for the two of them. They didn’t know who their dad was screwing with or the damnation he’d bring down on them. That side of things didn’t touch their lives, not really, it just slid off of that shield.

Until, one day, she was gone. Uncle Connor had been the one picking him up from elementary school, a heavy hand on his shoulder as they headed out to the car. Some days it was his dad, sometimes ma, more often than not one of his uncles or his dad’s people who came to get him. Always the same quiet trip home. Always. Only today the paging thingy on his uncle’s belt burst into life as he was getting buckled in. The change in Uncle Connor was instant and scary, he slammed the door, yelled at Grey to stay put as they raced home through traffic at a break neck speed. He was scooped out at the other end, rushed into the house and up into his dad’s office where his ma was balled up in a corner sobbing. A bruise blackened her eye, blood trickling from her mouth. Grey panicked, scrambling up into her lap. She sobbed, clinging to him, his sister’s name keening from her mouth.

Grey wouldn’t learn the details until much later. A kidnapping in the middle of the day. His ma walking down Bourbon Street with his sister asleep in her stroller, a walk they’d taken a thousand times, one that should’ve been safe even without the cover of his dad’s people around her but not that day it wasn’t. A black van screeching to a stop in the intersection, men in ski masks with weapons, turning the butts of their pistols on her face, knocking her down as they grabbed the stroller. One of the men had bent to hiss in her ear while the others bundled the little girl into their van. No police, no warfare, just wait for the call and their girl would be safe. Lies. Every single one of them. The call came that night, the terms negotiated, they were gonna give his sister back if his dad gave up his hold on the docks. His dad would’ve done almost anything for his family but that … He balked and that was all it supposedly took. His sister was dead, screams down the phone that cut off. Screams he heard over his mother’s. No body ever came, the stone set in the side of the vault in the cemetery that they visited every Sunday covering a void instead of remains. The street ran bloody for years afterwards.

It was in that blood bath that Grey grew. The shield thinned and his own hands ended up bloodied before he hit high school and for his ma’s sake he cleaned up his act at least a little. The Grey Maddox who graduated with a 4.0 GPA at 18 and headed for Tulane to joint major in Business Administration and Criminal Justice was an all-American clean cut kid on the surface. Nobody at the school knew he spent his weekends helping run guns, drugs and anything else black market his dad could get his hands on through the port of New Orleans. Nobody ever would if he had his way. None of them would learn he was spending all his spare time digging into the men who’d taken his sister either. Revenge had been extracted but it wasn’t enough. Somewhere out there his sister was slowly turning to dust … or she wasn’t. No body had ever turned up. No unidentified kids found in the City around that time, none matching her description since. He couldn’t bring it up to his ma, the loss of her daughter had shattered her, leaving her a ghost of the woman she once was and his dad and the rest of the family, they wouldn’t even say her name anymore.

He never found anything more though. The trail had gone long cold and as just a college kid he couldn’t get any deeper into the system to try and pull answers out of anybody. It didn’t sit well with him but Grey had to tuck it deep down inside for the time being. One day he’d find the people who’d done it and fingernail by fingernail they’d give him the answers he wanted. At 22 Grey graduated, valedictorian of his class and prepared to head back home to take up that hallowed position at his dad’s right hand. Not immediately of course, that wasn’t the way it worked even among the Maddox clan. You worked you way up, you took your lumps. For close to the next decade that was what he did, proving himself invaluable. An enforcer for his father to start with and then gradually the brains behind the family’s endeavours. A smartly dressed public face for what the Maddox family had continued to rule down at the docks.

Grey was on track to eventually take over his dad’s seat at the table but a year ago things rapidly went downhill again. Not another bloody snatch but something as pedestrian as a bad storm, a night out with friends in Baton Rouge and a drive home that never should’ve been attempted. Another car on the road swerved into the car driven by one of his dad’s people. Two vehicles found crushed like cans amongst the cyprus trees the next morning, both torched black by the violence of the crash. Bodies identified only by DNA and an era in New Orleans over. Nobody questioned the reason for the accident, it looked just like that but Grey’s suspicions always ran deep. He spent months prying into every bit of information he could, wielding far greater pressure this time. Nothing broke free but maybe there was some hint about his sister. The trail not so cold this time around, although the universe still wanted to shut him down it. Just when it felt like maybe his little sister was at his fingertips, real evidence that maybe she’d survived the kidnapping right there, the virus hit.

A nightmare raging through the world in what felt like an instant. Suddenly people were dropping like flies and people like him were in greater demand. People growing desperate for stuff as ridiculous as toilet paper and pasta, the real essentials – alcohol, weapons and medicine leaping in price. Walking away from his home base right then might’ve been one hell of a mistake but Grey could see the writing on the wall. Things were focusing on Lethford City, the lockdown taking people beyond desperation and into riots. Getting into the city wasn’t easy but what was in his life? Leaving the family’s holdings in the control of his cousin, a man who moved up to that major domo spot at his right shoulder since his parents had died, Grey made the leap, pulling on his connections to get himself into the city and back at a big table. The locals weren’t a patch on his own people back in New Orleans but it was close enough. They were willing to work for a cut and profit was plentiful. And his sister … Ruby. Ruby was right there. God. The baby all grown up and sitting on a nest egg that wasn’t just a golden goose, it was a whole damn flock of them. Now aware of his sister’s new identity and just whose bed she’s crawled into Grey’s working his way closer. The world might’ve been a mess but it’s certainly time for a reunion.