icc not creating a.out file

Yesterday when I ran the following line in terminal: icc -mkl -c -xAVX optimizedV4.c

I was able to get back: optimizedV4.o 

and: a.out

Today when I edited the c code, simply changing a loop variable, I only got the object file. No errors were thrown, except when typing ./a.out that there is no such file or directory.

Update:

This happened after I tried calling the compiler through a python script:

from subprocess import call

call(["icc", "-mkl", "-c", "-xAVX", "optimizedV4.c"])

I since uninstalled parallel studio and reinstalled it, I even copied the code into a file in /opt/intel/ and tried to compile it there, but I still did not get an a.out file from doing so. (No errors were given either, and the .o file was still created just fine.)