The King, formerly known as Carson Cash, is the leader of a pirate band operating out of the Memphis area along the Mississippi river. Carson and his men arrive at The Island on December 5th, 2003 and subjugate the colonists living there, including Sarah Hayes. They had been watching the Island and planning the invasion for some time beforehand.
The King was born in a small town outside Memphis in 1973, and was raised by a strict, abusive, Elvis-loving father Mason and his timid wife Dot. Carson ran away from home at 16 after an incident with his school principal and a misplaced rock throw, and soon fell in with a low-rate punk band called The Rags in Memphis. After severely beating a concert promoter, Johnny Dunn, for refusing to pay his band, Carson was sentenced to five years in prison, with parole in three for good behavior.
In prison he met his mentor, Clancy L. Atkins, a club owner from Memphis who guided Carson and taught him to control his anger and impulsiveness, and acted as the father figure that Carson never had. On his release from prison in 1992, Carson got a job as a bartender at Clancy’s Blue Suede Lounge. Like Carson’s father, Clancy was an Elvis man, and gradually brought Carson around to loving The King and his music.
While working at the Blue Suede Lounge, Carson met a bartender named Jackie. Together, after a whirlwind romance they were married and had a daughter, Lisa, and for a time things were good and Carson was happy. But it was not to last. One late afternoon Carson’s father showed up at the Blue Suede Lounge, destitute and left behind by the woman he cheated on Dot with. Mason refuses to leave town until Carson gives him five thousand dollars, and from then on Mason becomes a regular at the bar. Carson’s rage burned inside, but he did not want to burden Jackie or Clancy with the problem.
Soon, Carson’s life began to fall apart. Clancy died of a heart attack, and seeing Mason still alive with the man he considered his real father dead made Carson’s blood boil. One rainy night Carson had enough, and ordered the bouncers to forcibly remove Mason and make sure he never came back. Finding the Blue Suede Lounge deeply in debt after it was left to him in Clancy’s will, Carson’s stress levels shoot ever higher, and he soon turns to drinking, spending hours at the Lounge and ignoring Jackie and Lisa, and when he is home doing nothing but screaming at them.
After one particularly bad night, Jackie left Carson, and he was soon forced at rock bottom to sell his beloved Lounge to Clay Jackson, the underworld boss who ruled East Memphis. Carson moved back in with his mother, Dot, and found nothing to get him up in the morning most days. Agreeing eventually to take his mother to Graceland for her birthday, Carson was beginning to work up the courage to write to Jackie and fix things up between him and his wife, to see his daughter once more.
It was not to be. The day they went to Graceland was October 16th, 1998, the day before The Fall. Several people who had been infected with the virus that caused the dead to come back to life reanimated and tore through the crowd of tourists, killing Dot and plunging Carson into a world of chaos and insanity that he would not recover from.