Who: Erran and Gemma Where: Erran's room When: 9:30pm
So far, a few people had commented on the fact that Erran didn't seem particularly panicky about being kidnapped. Like he'd said to Marco, he tended to roll with weird situations if everyone else around him was operating as if it were business as usual; it was probably a dumb, ovine sort of instinct to assume that if other people were managing then the situation must be manageable, but still, he took his cues from others. The group was smart and capable. Cecilia seemed competent—from past experience, Erran was predisposed to think that nurses could handle anything. The place couldn't possibly be a completely impregnable fortress. They'd get out eventually.
All that went out the window the second he saw the words "relocated" and "suitcase" on the network message. The association it triggered was instant: every Shoah story he'd ever heard from elderly survivors on Tisha B'Av as a kid, every number he'd seen on a forearm, every story of Russian pogroms, the Alhambra Decree, Babi Yar, Chmielnicki, everything. Sitting on a cushion on the floor, stomach growling, sweating through too many layers of clothing in the summer heat, listening to the sad downward-spiralling trope of Megillat Eicha, stories of death all afternoon. His grandmother used to keep a packed suitcase in her closet. After reading the network message, the first word that came to mind was liquidation.
Playtime was over, for the people running this place. They were done. It was time to get rid of the subjects in the house, perhaps to make room for a new group, and the old ones would either be put to some final purpose or just shot in a field somewhere. Someone would sort through the contents of the suitcases and sell off whatever was still valuable.
Erran was terrified, a particular kind of fear that he'd never even experienced before except in dreams—he'd been afraid for his own life, in moments when he wasn't sure he'd survive an overdose or a frightening surgery, and he'd been afraid for his friends for similar reasons, but this was different. They're going to kill us.
Typing up his old Crisis Survival handout from memory was an attempt to mitigate the fear, and at least offer something to others that might be useful. It was better than just freaking the fuck out himself. And when Gemma replied it was a small relief—part of him had wondered if some of the people in the house had been removed early, do it in stages, divide them in groups, line them up...
But not yet. She was still here, and he didn't have to feel like a dumb overreacting idiot: come talk to me, I don't want to be alone.
He turned back to his open suitcase on the bed. It was the same one he used to take from Anaheim to Lakewood when he was a teenager, visiting his father in the summers, until the visits had stopped. He didn't have enough stuff to fill it all the way up, which was also freaking him out. Stupid.