Hair dyed pink, full of piss and vinegar, this young woman in her late 20s stares daggers at you. Through you. Through everybody. Maybe she wants to punch you. Or bite you. You're not sure which would be worse. All you know for sure? She looks like trouble.

Word traveled fast in the small community of people trapped inside the mall. Kate is a foul-mouthed greasemonkey from Riverside with a penchant for random destruction. Those military surplus boots she wears, as she'd tell you, were made for curbstomping. She's either really good at helping out if it involves a wrench, an electronic device, or a baseball bat, or good at helping people into an early grave.

She recklessly helped the deputy and Derek take down the squid-faced creature in the freezer, then aided Preston in getting an RV up and running so he could escape the mall and find his daughters. Preston wound up dead, found not far down the road from the mall. The mostly harmless young man named "Blade" died in her company while they were searching the mall for a gunman. And Roy died in the mist, soon after the started talking to him.

Kate and Jack appear to know each other from Riverside, both connected by a small community of local punks and street racers, centered around a crappy rock band based out of a flophouse in the poorer part of town. In the mall, the two hoodlums displayed a bond akin to rambunctious siblings, and quickly formed their own little faction of rebels without a cause.

When "Blade" fell off a rooftop and turned into a ravenous reanimated cannibal, he bit Kate twice, stopped only by the mysterious Roy. Kate and others first wondered if she would bounce back from her injuries, or soon join the ranks of the flesh-eating abominations. But those fears passed as the days went by and all wounds healed. She was back to frustrating Jim, drinking Dan's beer, and talking shit.

That said, she wasn't all talk and no walk. She set up a lookout perch on the eastern rooftop of the mall, opposite of Dalton's, where she played chess with the janitor, and watched the creatures in the mist to observe their behavior. She also teamed with Jim, Jack, Gary, Murphy, and Emma to start venturing outside the mall, butchering the dangerous monsters of the mist. Not only did she display a bravery that bordered on the suicidal, she often displayed a mixture of fascination and disgust whenever confronted with the grotesque.