The Perfect Escape

Kate is the second protagonist of the novel. She is Robbie Anderson-Steele’s 18-year-old daughter, Nate’s love interest, and a new employee of the zombie-themed escape room where Nate works. She loves theater and dreams of one day being an actress on Broadway. Her mother died due to untreated pneumonia, and Kate blames her father for this because he refused to take her mother to the hospital when she fell ill. Since her mother’s death, Kate has retreated inward, withdrawing from her friends and her social life, and as a result, she feels lonely and abandoned. Her father monitors her very carefully with his high-tech inventions, keeping constant track of Kate’s location, her interactions, her activities, and even her diet. Because of his extreme invasion of her privacy, she resorts to secrecy in her struggle to become financially and physically independent of her father. She sees winning the Zombiegeddon cash prize as the path to freedom from Robbie’s control. Although he is constantly watching her, he does so from afar using technology; he rarely interacts with her directly except to give her commands. He sees her passion for theater as a waste of time and demands that she follow in his high-powered footsteps. Her father’s behavior deepens her loneliness and grief until she meets Nate.

Slowly, Kate starts to become more social again by spending time with Nate and her close friend, Raina. She realizes that hiding herself away in her huge mansion with only Jeeves, her father’s butler robot, is worsening her depression. Even the act of getting ready to go out with Raina by trying on clothes and mentally preparing to be around people helps her to remember who she used to be before her mother died. She refuses to accept her father’s expectations for her life; she may be financially dependent on him, but psychologically, she is in control of her own future. Although she does not win the survivalist competition, participating in Zombiegeddon and overcoming survivalist obstacles helps her to rebuild her confidence. Her partnership with Nate shows her that even though building relationships with people can be scary because she risks losing them like she lost her mom, some people are worth braving that fear. In the end, she runs away to New York to follow her dreams with the little money that she has saved. Nate later gifts her a share of his prize money, which allows her to remain in the city where her father cannot find her. Still, she displays maturity in her willingness to rebuild their relationship and work toward forgiving him over time.

Robbie is Kate’s father and the CEO of the popular technology company Digitools. He is hyper-focused on his job and tends to neglect his daughter while he constantly travels for business purposes. Instead of supporting Kate, he employs extreme methods of surveillance in his parenting, which Kate resents. The whole world, especially Nate, looks up to him as a brilliant tech mogul and the future of Digitools’s merger with Zeneration, the company that is sponsoring Zombiegeddon. However, in the end, Robbie is revealed to be the ultimate antagonist of the novel, for he uses his innovative technology to further government and military surveillance without people’s knowledge. He lies to Kate and manipulates Nate into breaking up with her because he believes that he is protecting her future by doing so. Kate often doubts her father’s good intentions and sees him as more of an antagonist who blocks her dreams of freedom. Nate’s hero-worship of Robbie is ultimately shattered, which helps Nate to realize that he may be wrong about wanting to become the next Robbie Anderson-Steele.

Peter is a wealthy student from Nate’s school who bullies Nate and other scholarship students like him. Peter especially targets Nate because he is Korean. According to Nate, Peter’s behavior never becomes overtly racist but nonetheless contains bigoted undertones. His microaggressions against Nate—calling him Bruce Lee, “practicing” karate on Nate, and seeing Nate as embodying crude and racist stereotypes that are commonly associated with his cultural background—cause Nate to become uncomfortable and bitter at this poor treatment. Still, when Peter offers Nate close to $30,000 as a bribe to sabotage his grades and allow Peter a chance to make the Dean’s List, Nate briefly considers accepting. For Peter, everything is a capitalist transaction; he claims that if he wants something, all he has to do is buy it. Although Nate dislikes Peter and everything he represents, he still wishes that he had this kind of financial freedom. Peter eventually evolves from bully to full-on antagonist when he arranges for Nate’s father to be fired, buys his way into Zombiegeddon, and physically attacks Nate. Nate defeats him, and later, when Nate meets Robbie, he realizes that Robbie represents the kind of person that Peter is destined to become. Thus, Peter and Robbie are two sides of the same coin: privileged, wealthy white men who believe that they can control the people around them with money.