As per usual, this opening shouldn't shock you. I got another idea.

This time, as you might be able to tell, this one is a Resident Evil/Halo one of all things. Now, I have read a few of these on this site already and most of them involve the Chief or Arby and the Chief. So, I wanted to do a little thinking about how to proceed. I wanted to do something unique, something different. And while working on another idea I was listening to the Halo 3: ODST soundtrack and it hit me, an ODST in Racoon City during the events of Resident Evil 2. So, how exactly do I want to do this?

Here's what I was thinking. In a post-Halo 3 galaxy, an ODST goes on a mission that goes horribly wrong during a drop and ends up after some Slipspace shenanigans in 1998 Raccoon City during the height of the T-virus outbreak right around the time that Claire and Leon arrive in the city and end up separated. I'm not entirely sure what to do from there, but I'm sure I'll figure it out; after all, this is just a pilot to get the idea out there.

Title: Dropping into another kind of hell

Summary: After a drop gone wrong, an ODST Corporal ends up in a necropolis with nothing more than his silenced standard issue weapons, some ammo, and a knife. He's dropped into all kinds of hell, but this one is a new one.

Rating: T+ to M depending on what I want to put in. The big thing is how descriptive the zombies' death scenes or anything like that is portrayed or what language is thrown out there.

Disclaimer: I own nothing other than my copy of MS Word and my desktop. Resident Evil belongs to Capcom and Halo to 343i and Microsoft. I only own this insane idea. See the foreword for the full disclaimer.

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Prepare to drop.

Three words that all ODSTs hear right before performing the closest thing one can do to descending into hell itself: dropping in a pod from high orbit to slam into the ground and assault enemy forces to either establish a beachhead or to take out high priority targets in hostile territory. For some ODSTs, those words filled them with dread. After all, not everyone makes it every time to the ground in their pods. After all, even with excessive quality checks, manufacturing defects can still exist and heat shields fail. Even with the full technological advancements made by the UNSC in the last hundred years, mistakes happen. For others in the ODSTs, it was all about the adrenaline rush. It was all about going through one of the most thrilling rides of their lives. It was said that there were two types of people in the ODSTs: the elite marines of the UNSC, and those that were crazy enough to do it.

For ODST Corporal James Campbell, the Drop was a gamble. Like a fine game of poker, or Russian roulette. It was all the same at the end. You place your bets and the House gets to decide whether you win or lose. So far, the House had decided that he gets to win. Yet again he'd be loading bullets into the revolver, spinning the cylinder, and pulling the trigger by getting into that pod.

James looked over his pod and saw the two weapons inside needed for his mission: an M7S submachine gun and an SRS99 anti-material sniper rifle. Completing his kit was a single M6/SOCOM magnum, the deadly 'friend' of the ODST. The mission profile? Infiltrate an Innie outpost, take out the leader, signal for extraction. Easy. He and his squad would be dropped deep behind enemy lines and would have to move closer. Scuttlebutt was that the Innies were squatting in an alien ruin. No one knew anything else.

He hoisted himself into his pod and secured any weapons or articles that could become hazardous if left unattached or unsecured. All of his weapons were stowed away and was ready to drop. Well, as ready as one could be. The hatch closed and sealed his pod with a pressurizing hiss. The segmented hull cut the bay off and opened below him revealing the planet's surface below. Above his head on a console were four LEDs that were currently unlit. Once his pod moved into position, the LEDs lit up red. There was a beep as the countdown for the pod launch was initiated. As it did, one LED turned off. And so, it did for three more beeps. Finally, there was an extended beep where the LEDs all turned green and his pod accelerated towards the planet.

A rangefinder on the screen displayed the current altitude which was steadily decreasing at a fast rate. Dropping from high orbit was risky business, but the Navy needed to keep their presence relatively discreet. He and his squad adjusted their trajectory to hit the optimal LZ. They reached low orbit and broke through the clouds. His chute automatically popped to slow him down to not be a deathly impact. It was then that James noticed the silvery structures that were absolutely alien. Humans didn't build these and it sure wasn't the Covvies either; it was something else. There was some kind of cryptic beauty to the spire that was the center of these structures.

The admiration of these structures didn't last long as the ground forces noticed their approach and started to open fire at the pods incoming towards their position. Rockets and gauss rounds sped past James' pod as untrained and poorly calibrated weapons were his only saving grace. He looked at the rangefinder, he was still a thousand feet from the ground. Static started to cause the hairs on his arm and back of his neck to stand on end. There wasn't anything in the pod that would cause that. It was only a shout that came over the battle-net that explained what happened.

"Slipspace ruptures!" was shouted over the radio.

James was then suddenly surrounded in pure darkness. He was battered in every which way. To everyone on the battlefield, he was dead, another KIA in a bloody civil war. It would be after a bloody battle resulting in a loss from the Insurrectionist Movement that the structure was a Forerunner structure with a defensive grid of Slipspace generators. However, James would never know this. James? He would be dropping into another type of hell.

Inside the pod, James was thrown about as if he were in a blender. It would be later shown on a systems diagnostic that only ten minutes passed before he was spat out of the Slipspace portal into high atmosphere hurdling towards a city. A much smaller city in comparison than, say, New Mombasa. The city was already under the cover of darkness with the setting sun shining a blood orange in the windows of skyscrapers. The citizens of the said city were too concerned with their own survival against a different kind of horror that would be revealed to the world in the near future.

The pod slammed into the side of a building and landed in the middle of a parking garage several blocks from a certain mansion styled police station. Time passed as the knocked-out occupant laid safe within his pod. The same could not be said for the citizens of the city below which became victims of an unleashed 'Pandora's Box'. The sun set and turned into night. Rain started to fall from the sky helping to quench some of the fires that had broken out in the chaos. As the rain poured on the city, an unlikely duo was approaching the city for answers of what was going on and to seek help.

James blinked back into reality as spots sat in his eyes at odd places that made it hard to see what was going on. A groan escaped his lips in automatic response to the rough landing. He gave himself a quick physical once-over. Ten fingers and toes, a head, arms, legs, feet. Everything was there. "Another happy landing," he breathed in sarcasm. He could already hear the rain pattering against his pod in a steady tone. A light rain, nothing that terrible in the sense of weather. An inconvenience? Sure, but it was nothing that he wasn't trained to handle.

He looked for the four explosive bolt override buttons on the door of his pod. Each had to be pressed in a sequence, a clockwise fashion, to release the pod door. He slammed his fist against each bolt. After the fourth and final one was hit, the door hissed and exploded outward. It shot out into the night and crashed into something down below other than just concrete or pavement.

He drew his pistol and leaned carefully out of the pod and took in his surroundings. He was in a city, first and foremost. This was unexpected. He was previously above a planet with jungle-like conditions and ruins of an alien civilization that wasn't Covenant. The next thing that he noticed was that the city was quiet, too quiet. Uncomfortably still. He looked down the street that he was currently a good two stories above and all the cars were stopped. Not only were they stopped but some were crashed while others were on fire. There were some police cars and ambulances, but they too were either crashed or on fire as well. Some even still had their emergency lights still on. This entire situation rubbed him the wrong way.

He turned on his radio, breaking his previous order to remain in radio silence between the squad and the ship. "Command, I've got an odd situation, over," he said. When nothing responded, not even a ping to continue talking, he repeated himself. "UNSC Erebus, please respond, over." Yet again, no response. He changed the frequency to a more commonly used one by the civilians, military, and police alike for non-encrypted information transfer. "Captain, Foley, anyone out there?" He waited for several minutes waiting for anyone to respond. No one did.

But just because no one responded didn't mean someone wasn't listening in. However, James didn't know that. But a government and a global conglomerate were listening in to that last transmission, a transmission that never left the city limits.

He looked down to see fallen bodies in the alleyway that his pod was tucked into. They didn't look right. Using the Smart Scope on his pistol, he saw that some were bullet ridden while others looked extremely decomposed. He pulled a cord out of the pod's supply compartment and rolled it down so it hit street level. He grabbed his weapons and attached them to his person with the magnetic holster and spot on his back. He repelled down the building with little trouble, this wasn't the first time that he had to do such a thing.

He activated the VISR software and the entire alley became more in focus. The bodies were mutilated beyond recognition, like something feasted on them akin to wild dogs or some other wild animal. He drew his pistol and leaned down to examine one of the bodies. One thing that he noted was that these were animal bites, but human. He had heard of the infamous Bath Salt incident in Florida from the 21st century, but this was something else. He checked for a pulse, unsurprisingly the person was dead. He stood up and walked away. But as he did, his motion tracker spiked in activity. He turned around to see what looked like a zombie from those old 1980 films lunging towards him. Without thinking, he drew his pistol and placed a single semi-armor piercing, high explosive round from his pistol into the skull of the person. It dropped like a puppet without strings. The only sounds in the alley were a whisper quiet snap of a bullet being fired, and a body falling to the ground. "What the fuck?" he whispered.

He walked back over to the body and nudged it with his boot. It didn't respond. This was beyond strange. A body coming back to life? This gave him flashbacks to Voi and the Ark. He knew people that were stationed there that made it out. They told how this entity called the Flood took over bodies and mutated them into unfeeling, killing entities. They reanimated the dead and deformed them to a point in which they no longer looked like who they used to. They told how they were kept up at night seeing the pain and horror in the eyes of friends that they knew for years that they had to shoot and kill. But this body didn't look like the Flood, it was something else. While the Flood were kept hush-hush and people only spoke about them in whispers and rumor, they had specific physical characteristics. Three tentacle-like appendages coming out of the head or chest which connected to an infection form. They also looked extremely decayed and mutated or mutilated. This zombie had none of those features. Ergo, this was not the Flood.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw where the pod hatch had landed. Underneath it was another one of those zombies attempting and failing to get out from under it. It was several hundred pounds of titanium and ceramic plating used to keep him alive during the drop. He walked over to it slowly and drew his combat knife. It was a titanium carbide knife honed to a monomolecular edge. He stabbed it into the brain of the zombie, taking the subliminal advice from centuries of horror fiction, and slashed upwards. The honed edge sliced through flesh and bone as if it were hot butter. The zombie lay still and he continued into the street.

The street wasn't much better. There were shambling corpses of the living dead limping from place to place, some were on the ground feasting upon prey they had chased down in their mob mentality. He used the stealth skills he picked up on some of the wetwork operations he had taken part in where stealth was of the utmost importance. He picked up pebbles and shells from bullets and threw them, using the sound to distract nearby zombies. Using his motion tracker, he figured out where zombies were even before he saw them. The road he was on went on for a quarter mile, but it felt like a hundred miles long. He made his way to what looked like a police station, it currently had the front gate sealed shut. He couldn't reach the latch from this side, so he started climbing the fence.

It wasn't the most difficult thing to climb, but what made it excessively annoying is that he had to move excruciatingly slow in order to not disturb the fence and the metaphorical legion of zombies currently roaming, looking for their next meal, and he refused to let it be him. Once he reached the top, he wasted no time and just jumped down, reducing the impact with a combat roll. The zombies definitely heard that and started to rush the rolled iron fence. It didn't do them much good since all they did was bounce off of it. Not wanting to test the tensile strength of steel and brick, he quickly moved inside the police station. However, what he did not expect was to get a gun shoved up to the side of his helmet.

"Who are you?" a man growled.

"Corporal James Campbell, marine corps," he answered. It was a good of answer if any.

"You don't look like any kind of marine I've ever seen," he rebutted.

"And you don't look like… who are you anyway?" James asked.

"Leon Kennedy, I was supposed to start today at the Racoon City Police Department," the now-named Leon replied.

"You picked a shitty day to start work." Leon silently agreed. "We aren't enemies here; can you remove the gun from my helmet?"

He did and James was less on edge. "I told you why I was here, what are you doing here?" Leon asked.

"I was supposed to rendezvous with my squad, they've all gone radio silent," he partially lied. He had learned the name of this city, Raccoon, and it didn't ring a bell with any of the UNSC major worlds, especially one of this size. If you had a city of this size on any planet, the name of it would at least be common knowledge, but this one wasn't ringing any bells.

During this mental thought process, Leon eyed his weapons. "That's a big gun."

"Snipers, reach out and touch someone," James replied in jest. "So, how do we get out?"

"The entire street outside is completely blocked off and the only way out is currently being blocked by a burning semi carrying fuel."

"I guess I'm stuck here then. Mind if I tag along?" James asked.

"Are you any good with those guns?"

A zombie growled and the motion tracker went off. Without flinching, he pulled up the M6 and shot over his shoulder, nailing the zombie right in the head which killed it instantly. One might say that it was a trick shot that was lucky. In reality, behind Leon there was a mirror and he had an infrared laser on the end of the pistol that VISR was picking up, no luck about it. "I'd like to think so."

James needed answers, both to whatever this outbreak was and what happened to him. And the current way to find that out was to stick with Leon.

To be continued…?

XxXxXxX

And there we go, another pilot down. This was definitely a different direction than most of my other stuff has gone. Or, at least I think it's different. Long time readers might think that it's the same stuff I've always done. But I really don't have many notes for this story. Not many references that need explaining or other things that need to be elaborated on. Basically, this will be a tagalong fic where an additional character just tags along with the main characters of the story. As for if James the ODST will go off on his own little adventure, I have no idea, I haven't planned that far in advance. I just had this oddball idea that I wanted to get out while it was stuck in my head and while it was still fresh at what the idea was. After all, I've started things at times and had no idea what I wanted to do after.

But what do you guys think about this one. Continue it? Shelve it? Try again? Let me know in all the usual ways. Until next time!