Pandemic A

The Sergeant

The sun was setting on yet another dim day in the Holy War.

As life was diminishing amazingly in the Middle East from trials of God, the masses were storming the holy city, trying to finally eradicate their ennemies in the name of their mesiah, to spend their final moments in the land they had fought for for so long.

The Sergeant was a bulky man in his late thirties, with striking features and a few streaks of gray. He had long since abandoned his old identity, completely devoting himself to the service of defending Israel.

The disease had started here.

This was where the world first heard of the mystery illness but nobody thought too much of it.

For weeks the country had dissolved, leaving only rag tag groups of people.

But the remainder of life was absolutely hell-bent on keeping the city for the Jews.

Not medecine, not love, not food or water, but order and determination kept the company of twenty-six men and women alive.

They had moved into an empty tower looking over the downtown of the city.

After flushing out the place of bodies, they guarded a wall around the Holy Dome with a perimeter of absolute solidity. If not a spare tank or mashine gun, each road leading inward was blocked by a short wall of debris (and occasionally corpses).

"Sir, corporal Hoffa on the west balcony reports having seen something land in the stadium."

"Probably nothing. We know how he's a bit... Loopy."

How little he knew.

Thousands had gathered. Thousands of people, almost the entire population of Gaza and Lebanon had squished themselves into the stadium.

And they were right to be doing what they were. They wanted to spend their dying days in the place they wanted so badly to call home.

But all of them, on both sides, were unaware of the even more dire situation in Pakistan and India.

Both possesed nuclear weapons.

Both were at war.

...

When the sun rose the next morning, nothing remained. From the eastern edge of the mediterranean to Bangladesh, the middle-east had been obliterated.

It was the single largest span of nothigness in the world.

You may be asking why I used the Sergeant to tell you this.

It is because it was he, not the Pakistani or the Indians, that started this chain of events.

The radio signals sent from his team was intercepted by an Indian satellite, and in a command submarine somewhere near Shri Lanka the generals that hadn't died of the disease made the decision to kill those that hadn't been ailed by the NCR Virus.

They pushed the button thinking an Israeli order to fire a missile at a group of Insurgents to be a Pakistani order to fire upon India.

Within seven minutes it was gone.

Seven minutes of sunlight in the night.

Seven minutes.