(Hey Everyone, this is my first FanFic ever so I hope it works out, anyways thanks for reading)

…

The Master Chief, Arbiter, and Cortana had just made it back to the UNSC Forward unto Dawn when the Halo ring fired and destroyed the flood for good. The Arbiter, having been at the front of the ship made it back to earth through slipspace but Chief and Cortana weren't so lucky though.

Chief heard the blast wave getting closer and Cortana knew that their section of the Dawn wouldn't make it.

"Chief we have to get further into the ship! Now!" Cortana said.

"Agreed" Chief said as he dashed for the airlock of the hanger.

Chief had made it about a quarter of the way down the hallway when the blast wave struck the Dawn. Chief was immediately incapacitated and Cortana was forced to reboot from the overwhelming power surge.

…

When Chief regained consciousness he realized that he was at the far end of the hallway he was running through. At first he had just thought it was the blast but he then realized that there was gravity at a normal 1.0 G level.

"Cortana" Chief called as he realized that she was still rebooting. "Cortana wake up!"

Cortana finally finished optimizing her systems and came online. "Chief! We're alive!" she exclaimed.

Chief rolled his eyes in his helmet. "Yes we are but what I want to know is if the artificial gravity generators are functional and if so why are they set to a 1.0 G level?"

Cortana hesitated and then said "Plug me into a terminal"

Chief found an AI compatible terminal and plugged Cortana's AI chip into it.

"Chief, you're not going to like this." She said worryingly. "The artificial gravity generators are offline as are most of the ships main systems. To make things worse, I only have signals from systems in the ship that where located in the rear half of the Dawn!"

"Are you saying that the Dawn was…" he began but was cut off by Cortana.

"Sliced in half when the blast wave from Halo closed the slipspace rupture? Yes."

Chief sighed. "Where are we now? I mean we must be on a planet if there is still atmosphere and a perfect level of gravity right?"

"I would assume so but at the moment all exterior cameras and scanners are down. Yank me and we'll go outside and find out." Cortana said.

Chief pulled the AI chip out of the terminal and put it into his helmet. He then proceeded to the hanger bay. The door he came through was jammed and would have taken hours for any normal marine or ODST to bypass but it was just an annoyance for a Spartan. Chief pulled the door back to revel the hanger bay and was surprised to find that the remaining part of the Dawn was perfectly level. Even more shocking was the sight of a planet that had lush plant life but was strikingly similar to earth.

"Cortana, are there any usable vehicles left in the hanger bay?" Chief asked.

"Well some that could be repaired easily but as of the moment no" Cortana responded.

"We may not have time to do repairs, there could be Covenant forces in the area" Chief said.

"Ok I managed to get one of the exterior cameras online but I don't think it is functioning correctly." Cortana said.

"Why?" Chief asked.

"It is picking up hundreds of motion signatures outside and some sort of outpost resembling that of a 21st century radio station nearby." Cortana said.

"Well let's have a look at these motion sigs shall we" Chief said as he walked over to the open hanger doors and looked down. What he saw was a relief as there were tones of humans at the base of the dawn. But something was off about them, he only heard loud groaning from them and they all seemed to just be pressing themselves against the base of the ship. "Cortana, these people look human but their behavior is odd. What is going on with them?" Chief asked.

"I don't think that those creatures are human Chief or at least they aren't anymore." Cortana said worryingly.

"Flood?" Chief asked with surprise.

"If they are Flood then they are a wildly new strain. Those creatures have a base body structure of a human but they appear to have experienced rapped tissue decay, I would say at the same rate as if they were dead! To add to the list of weird things about these creatures, they aren't giving off any body heat at all!" Cortana sounded more and more shocked as she rambled on.

"How are they even alive?" Chief asked.

"Well we could more effectively study them in the Dawn's medical bay. As I recall it was located in the rear of the ship. It has enhanced scanners and was retrofitted to protect against flood outbreaks before we left earth." Cortana suggested

"What about the radio outpost?" Chief asked. "I mean obviously the scanner worked fine so there must be something out there."

"I would advise against going outside until we know what these creatures are capable of." Cortana said.

"Alright, I'll get a test subject" Chief said

Before Cortana could say anything Chief jumped down to the ground catching the attention of several creatures. Where most species that saw a nearly 7-foot-tall super soldier would have been in awe these creatures just held their arms out in front of them and slowly approached Chief, groaning in a hungry way every step. Chief told them to stop but they didn't even seem to hear it. One finally got close enough to bite Chief but when it tried it got its head knocked off with a well-placed hook punch. Another tried the same thing but chief kicked right through its torso. This one however, didn't die but kept trying to bite and scratch Chief.

"Cortana, how it that thing not dead!" Chief screamed

"I have no idea!" Cortana said in a shocked manner.

The creature Chief kicked had been despised and completely demobilized but it was still groaning and moving its head. Chief put it out of its misery by stepping on its head. Another creature attacked Chief from behind but met the same fate as the first creature had. Chief quickly learned that the only way to completely kill a creature was with a blow to the head or temple area. Chief fought the creatures for over an hour killing almost all of them around the Dawn and even some that just happened to be near it. Cortana kept a carful count of every single one that Chief killed and scanned them just before he did. By the time the Dawn was completely clear of the creatures Chief had killed eight hundred fifty-two of them. Chief hadn't enjoyed killing any of them but they all either tried to attack him or were attempting to do damage to the Dawn. Chief returned to the Dawn victorious and with a creature that he had managed to capture by grabbing its neck from behind.

…

In the medical bay the captured creature was restrained on a medical table intended to hold a person that was just infected by the flood. Cortana was conducting some high powered scans so Chief was outside watching. Cortana finally finished and gave Chief the bad news.

"Chief, the only good new I have is that we are not dealing with the flood. Outside of that, we may have just discovered a new threat. This creature is essentially a reanimated corpse; the only reason it's alive is because of an extremely potent virus that has basically half destroyed half high jacked its brain. It can feel no pain and cannot die from blood loss so the only way to pertinently kill one of these things is to destroy or at least heavily damage the brain. Even worse is that there seems to be an internal code written in the DNA of the virus. It's almost like a prime directive. It forces the victim to go around and infect other life forms by triggering an ancient reflex of the human brain that would force the victim to eat or attack any animal that could be food. But it especially targets other humans. However, after our excursion outside I identified a foreran agent in the air supply that your suit had been filtering out. After some research I discovered that it was an airborne strain of the virus and that it could in theory infect any person with the virus. The virus only becomes active after death though, no living being can become one of these creatures, they would have to die first. A bite or scratch from a creature could kill a normal human though"

Chief was speechless, he had fought his way through hell and back and had seen some crazy stuff in that time but he had never thought that he would have to fight the literal undead!

"Cortana about how long has it been since this infection started" Chief said with a kind of tone that Cortana hadn't ever heard him use. A tone that had just a hint of fear in it.

"Based on the level of decay in those creatures outside, I would say at least a decade ago." Cortana responded

Chief regained his composer and simply said "We need to get to that radio station and get a message to any ships in the area telling them to quarantine this planet."

"Agreed" Cortana said. "But I wouldn't chance fighting these things hand to hand again, get to the backup armory and get ready for war and then repair a vehicle so that we don't have to fight these things on foot." Cortana said

Chief followed her instructions to the "T". He got to the armory and picked out a battle rifle, a Spartan laser, and a magnum pistol. After that he went and repaired a warthog and checked the ammo on its turret. He also loaded a weapons create into the warthog just in case. They left the Dawn at about 3:00 in the afternoon. Chief ran over or shot any creatures he saw without hesitation.

…

After a considerable amount of driving they made it to the Radio station at about 6:30 pm. Chief had come prepared for a fight with the Covenant so it was a massacre for the creatures. The warthog smashed through the chain linked fence easily and landed in the middle of a massive herd of the creatures. Chief hopped on the turret and blasted every single member of the undead in sight. The massacre had gone on no longer than five minutes before Chief had cleared out every single creature in the entire outpost.

"Well that was impressive, even for you" Cortana said

"They didn't even try to take cover, they came to me and I took advantage of the free shots" Chief said coldly

"Ok well, this tech is primitive but if there are still satellites I should be able to get a message to any UNSC, Elite, or Covenant vessels in the area. But first you need to find a master computer, it will have access to most if not all of the systems here. I would imagine that the backup generators will also need to be turned on since there is no power." Cortana said

"Right" Chief said.

After about an hour of repairing and turning on generators Chief located the master computer and uploaded Cortana into the system.

"Satellite connection established" Cortana said triumphantly. "Ok now let's…" she paused. "Chief! We have a huge problem!"

"What is it?" Chief asked.

"We didn't crash on some distant planet in the middle of nowhere, we're on earth!" Cortana said