Gnash by Brian Parker

950 Shiite Muslims on pilgrimage had trampled one another when rumors of a suicide bomber swept through the crowd.  There seemed to be just as many bodies down in the lobby area as that day in Baghdad.  So much death and so many lives ruined, then and now.  For what?  What was this all for?
    After they left the lobby, the thing that shocked everyone was the lack of bodies.  They had to step on hundreds of corpses to make it into the actual building, but then there weren’t any more.  When the colonel called up this highly unusual finding, they were told to carry on and keep an eye out.  The little voice in the back of Sergeant Owens’ brain kept screaming that something wasn’t right.
    When the command element reached the courtyard it was more of the same scene as inside.  It was deserted, almost as if nothing had happened.  The grass was well-manicured, the edges were trimmed and the trash cans were emptied of garbage.  The only thing out of the ordinary was the absence of the birds that usually flew around the area.  Owens had been stationed here as a brand new buck sergeant, years ago and he remembered that the birds in the courtyard were absolutely everywhere in the springtime.  It didn’t make sense that there weren’t any. 
    Not only was the lack of bodies disconcerting, but Owens was also beginning to worry about his men’s chemical protective suits.  They were fine for limited use around biological agents, but not sustained use.  If this attack was biological like he suspected, the suits could begin to fail before and his men would be at risk. 
    The more he thought about it, the more he felt that the absence of any bodies or animal life in the courtyard was indicative that something terrible was going on.  Why were there all those bodies right there in the lobby, but absolutely nothing anywhere else?  Had everyone who tried to get out of the main exit through the lobby died and those that didn’t were alive somewhere?  There were about 27,000 employees in this building, where were they?
    The search teams were reporting the same thing over and over: No chemical agents detected and only a few bodies here and there.  On the bodies they did find, there was evidence of severe trauma on them.  Sergeant Gutierrez’ team discovered two bodies in the Joint Emergency Operations Center on the first sub-basement level that had their heads bashed in and one had an arm missing.  It was unexplainable but they had to keep going, maybe they had fought with each other near the end.
    The shadows had already lengthened across the courtyard to a degree that their eyes began to play tricks on them.  In less than an hour it would be totally dark out here like it was on the inside the building.  Owens sighed and walked back to where Specialist Givens was monitoring the radio.  He placed a hand on the kid’s shoulder and asked him how things were going. 
    It was meant as an encouraging, fatherly gesture, but the young specialist jumped and gave out a frightened yelp.  “I’m sorry, Sergeant.  Guess I’m a little bit jumpy right now.”  He looked at his notebook.  “Um, teams two, three and one have reported in.  No word from Sergeant Gutierrez’ team in the past twenty minutes.  But as you can see in monitor four, they’re still moving.  Maybe there’s too much interference for the radio to work properly the deeper underground they go.”
    “Hand me the mike, will you?  And have you seen the colonel?  He needed to piss and didn’t want to do it outside.  He went to the bathroom at the apex a while ago but hasn’t came back.”
    “No, I haven’t seen him in about ten or fifteen minutes, Sergeant.”
    “Ok, we’ll give it five more minutes then I’m gonna send the MPs looking for him.”  He keyed the button on the radio handset.  “Febris Three-Seven, this is Febris Three-Two, over.”  He paused for a few seconds, “Febris Three-Seven, this is Febris Three-Two, over.”