Jacques found a house that was on the outskirts of town that was small but had a great view of the surrounding areas. The home was well stocked with canned goods – in fact an entire basement pantry of glass jars of home-canned food. The home also had a small enclosed water tower that was ninety percent full. He tested the water and found that it was good.
For four hundred years he lived alone in his house. No one from his former group came that far north and no one from the outside world came that far south (if they still lived).
If he would have met someone from New Orleans – now just called Orleans – he would have learned that the same abilities that he had obtained had been obtained by others. No one else had all of the abilities that he had but nearly everyone possessed at least one of his abilities. It seemed their experimenting with Parapsychology had yielded success. The abilities of others were successfully harvested and implanted into those with previous non-abilities. Then, genetics took over and those abilities were passed on and grew.
Jacques was still not able to explain why he now possessed every ability they had studied and how those abilities continued to grow.
If he had spoken with any of the descendants of his former group, he would have learned that they branched off into two groups. The two groups were defined by their specific study areas at the facility just before the world changed. The division of the groups was based on the previous relationships and comfort level of each group with one other so that they might work better as a team in exploring New Orleans. The separation was more of a survival tactic than anything. The two groups each took half of New Orleans with a mission of determining the livability of their respected part of the city.
The first group, led by Julius Babel, had been studying the chokka, a type of squid. The name came from the South African version of the creature. They had discovered the squid produced a naturally occurring parapsychological chemical.
Upon study of the creature, they learned that specific subspecies of the chokka possessed a unique chemical as part of their biological makeup that gave them a strength advantage over their cousins. When the chemical was transplanted into test mice, it gave the mice incredible strength. The group had just begun to explore the options when the earth shook.
The second group consisted of members who were working on a phenomenon called returning. Returning was a rare talent in which a host could recall any item that he had touched in the past and that object would appear before him at will. The original team leader had been from the Czech Republic and the name of the phenomenon in his native tongue was návratu. Since návratu sounded more exotic to the group than returning, the name stuck.
So the two groups took on the names of the team projects – the Chokka team and Návratu team. They had no idea that the separation of the two groups would eventually lead to a malevolent split.
Over time, the names of the teams became the adopted name of the people in that group, almost as if they were their own tribe of people. When both groups found that New Orleans was livable (there were still some concerns about radiation), they decided that the Chokka group would settle the French Quarter, the Arts District, and the Garden District, ignoring what was once downtown. The Návratu group settled the Ninth Ward.
Once settled, the new people of New Orleans went about reclaiming their daily lives. There was a good mixture of males and females and soon couples were married and brought the second generation of their group into the new world. The children were born naturally with many of the same psychic abilities that their parents had developed artificially. The two sides were unsure of the level of the abilities on either side and this led to jealously and then distrust. The groups began to fear what the other group could achieve with the new abilities. Paranoia settled in and conflicts began.
It wasn’t long until the two groups were at war with one another. The people that only thirty years earlier had struggled for survival together when their nation crumbled were divided and bitter enemies.
Eventually, the Návratu were forced from Orleans by the Chokka. They moved to the Outerlands and later the Barren Lands, plotting their revenge. The Chokka learned that the one of the German members of the Návratu had begun calling their nation Klopp as a homage to the well-known German footballer and coach. They would be known going forward as Klopph.
Jacques knew none of this. If he had, he wouldn’t have cared. What he did care about was the object that he had discovered in what the people of Orleans called the Barren Lands (he still called it St. Tammany Parish). The object was something that they had been working on before the world shook. He had last seen the object at the facility and he had no idea how the object came to be at the edge of what used to be Lake Pontchartrain.
The object was delicate and so he picked it up carefully. Then very carefully, he took it back to his home.
He had no idea he was being watched.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“How do they work?” The man, like Julius, was on the first team to study the newly discovered portals.
“I’m not quite sure yet.” Julius
