The Moloch: a setting sourcebook for KULT

Chapter 9: Not a Holiday Camp

A couple of days later the PCs find Josef Bern (the old man who had guided them through part of the sewer system after checking their arms to his satisfaction) coughing, sick and generally unable to keep up his existence without medical help in a narrow off-off-back alley, which also has a symbol chalked on a wall which means 'Keep out'. The gather him up - he does not respond to questions, but he semi-lifts a fist out of which there juts some piece of paper - which the PCs ignore.

He lets the paper fall, Kurt picks it up and puts it in his pocket - unread. (What is it that makes players of RPGs miss large red signs saying HINT in gleaming yellow letters?)

While Peter goes away to find an entrance to the underground Josef gathers his remaining strength to lift his hand, now devoid of pieces of paper, halfway to Kurt's face. Now Kurt at last decides to while away the time waiting for Peter by looking at the piece of paper. It is a business card saying 'Private clinic Dr. Schilling' along with an address. Recalling their conversation with the Professor Kurt remembers that this was the very place where the Professor was brought back to life, a clinic which usually caters to the very rich but, inofficially, also to the poor - for free.

The PCs decide to take Josef there, and the quickest way (with no taxi wanting to stop for them) is the city train (which cannot be called an underground because it's above ground most of the way). The carriage they enter holds only six other people. The PCs put Josef on a seat and sit down as well.

At the following stations many people get in so that finally all seats are taken and people are crowded in the aisle. Then the train goes underground - but the interior lights remain off.

In the complete dark people begin to wonder - a child is whining - a woman says 'Where will they take us?' The train does not stop nor do the lights go on. Someone begins to sing with a whining voice in a strange language. The PCs find out that a) they are now standing and the seats are gone, b) Josef is gone, too and c) they are on a train of the type they have previously seen in TV documentaries many times: a train bound for a Nazi concentration camp.

After hours of travelling the train stops at a station in nowhere where the people are ordered out and marched into a concentration camp. The PCs stay together while Josef is nowhere in sight. There is something wrong with the camp, however: instead of the well-known slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' (work makes free) above the entrance it says 'Sin makes free'. This and other small hints make the PCs believe they are in a dream. With well-performed sanity checks they can convince themselves so completely of this that they need no further checks and can even take it a bit humorously.

They are forced to undress, then sent through a lice-killing dust shower, then their arms are forced into a machine which burns a running number on their arms: 31382 and 31383 respectively. Then they are locked into a barracks with 40 others.

The next day they are woken to be walked through a strange and horrifying routine: first they are soaked with cold water; next they are sent into a hall where piles of naked, emaciated, dead people are lying about. They have all bled profusely from all orifices of the body. The PCs and their companions are forced to put them on carts and drag them to another hall to pile them up again. Here cat-sized rats are freed from cages along the wall to feast on the bodies. The PCs' group meanwhile is led to another such hall where they are given a sack and ordered to collect a whole skeleton from the hall (where an earlier delivery of corpses were picked clean). Then they are marched to yet another hall where they are told to assemble their respective skeletons on vivisection tables with a set of tools and nails. Then a device of guiding rails above their heads ushers in a number of transparent sacks which each contain a skin, complete with blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair. The skeletons are to be stuffed inside those skins via the very elastic mouth. Then those bags of bones have to be brought next door where a big funnel of light leather patchwork (with five-digit numbers burnt into it in places) is suspended from the ceiling. The fleshless skins are to be put underneath it and something which to all effects can best be described as excrement is filled into them until their bodies have normal proportions. Then they are brought into the next room where the PCs have to clothe them into SS uniforms. After that the PCs and their group are sent back to their barracks with no food and only another cold shower to quench their thirst.

The same routine goes on the next day with only a break for supper when they receive a thin broth. Having fasted for days already after their previous adventure they decide to skip this meal, too. Cheering themselves up with the idea that they will have to wake up eventually they begin to misplace or break bones in the skeletons they are building.

The next day two of their group suffer a breakdown and are sent to the infirmary. One rejoins the group later; the other is in the barracks already when the group returns. There is no food today.

The PCs begin to form a plan. They want to avail themselves of a uniform. The guards have grown more careless by the day and there are doors in the final hall that could lead to storerooms where the uniforms are located. But in the morning, when splashed again with cold water from a hose, Peter suffers a breakdown and is brought to the infirmary. He doesn't return all day.

When he awakes he finds himself on a bloodied vivisection table with soft parts of other people's internal organs under him. He is stripped naked and quite weak. Oversized instruments are distributed on other tables and along the wall, bone saws and other tools that look as if two people were needed to operate them. On another wall there are preserved specimens of heads, genitals and other body parts in glass jars. Severed (or more precisely ripped-off) limbs hang from the ceiling on hooks and chains.

Then the doctor comes in: stooped, but all of 4 meters high, a creature of steel, grey flesh and blood behind darkish glass in a lab coat, with yellow eyes with red pupils the only living thing in a face of metal (a KULT Razide). He uncoils a meter-long tongue, probing Peter's anus, then his body and finally his mouth and nose with its tip. When Peter proves alive and without open wounds the Razide flushes a pill down his throat then turns away and leaves the room. Peter grows a bit stronger within moments and then hears a whining sound behind him. On a chain next to a low wooden door there is a black dog with three different kinds of dog heads on it. A sorry creature for all its apparent aggression as all three heads are connected with the nervous system and compete for control of the body. Peter evades it and reaches the door, steps through. He find himself in the lobby of Dr. Schilling's clinic and loses consciousness.

Kurt meanwhile goes through the same routine as the days before but walks into one of the storerooms of the last hall when no-one is watching. The guards find out he is mising soon enough but don't search the storerooms which actually do hold the uniforms. Kurt puts on one of the uniforms, then waits. When the other prisoners have been sent out the lights go off and only a dim illumination remains. From the ceiling a creaking noise is heard as hoses looking very much like intestines are uncoiled from above; with pig-like snouts they touch down on the bodies and sniff out their way into their mouths. Something is pumped down through the hoses and the bodies begin to twitch. Then the hoses are pulled back up and some static is heard as speakers are switched on and a recorded voice gives orders to rise to attention, then walk outside. Kurt joins the soldiers.

Outside they are led into their barracks where each immediately lays down on his bed. There is a full set of gear for everyone including a pistol and a rifle and a fully equipped backpack.

Kurt goes out to find Peter. He checks the infirmary first, the Razide opens the door. Apparently unable to speak the creature gestures that Peter was no longer here. Kurt then checks their barracks but it is open and no-one is there. Instead there is something going on at the hall that they usually visit first in the morning. Obviously their comrades, Peter possibly among them, are just now being disposed of.

Kurt goes back to the infirmary to be sure and goes in through a low wooden door behind which a snoring three-headed dog lies on a chain. He finds a lamp and walks through the infirmary where dead bodies in various stages of disassembly lie on the tables. He doesn't want to look, but everyone here is obviously very dead, and there is no sign of Peter. Therefore he resolves to try and flee alone.

The only way out of the concentration camp is through the gate and that is crowded as a new delivery of prisoners is coming in. Kurt decides to wait in one of the troop transporters parked on a lot a bit away from the rest of the camp until this is finished. Then he attempts to use the lorry to make a break for the exit, now closed, but the searchlights are on him immediately and machine gun fire guts the lorry and takes apart his left leg. He lies bleeding in the wrecked car, smashed against a pole, when he loses consciousness.