Manifest Gluttony

Manifest Gluttony

With the exception of a few gallons of frozen urine voided into the vastness of space by astronauts every drop of water the earth has ever had is still here. Whether as a species we have the ability to benefit much longer from this wonderful gift depends entirely on our ability to change. Life will go on in some form, frolicking in these eternal waters long after we are gone, just as it did before we embarked on our journey. Manifest Gluttony is about decisions and the costs tied to them. It is the story of two men and their intersecting pilgrimages across a world they had helped to shape. Several centuries ago word smiths re-forged greed, theft, and genocide into a destiny, Manifest Destiny, and justified all manner of crimes under the dubious mantle of gods special intentions for a racial group, we have in theory discarded the racial elements of this quest and in its place have decreed that progress is measured by possessions and the right and duty to consume should be our legacy.

Manifest Gluttony

By Stephen J Pitzen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright (c) 2014 by Stephen J Pitzen

Ebook formatting by Jesse Gordon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

About the Author

Chapter 1

When the glaciers gave up control of the land and slowly melted the receding ice pack left a debris field of aggregate it had scooped up as it rolled over what would eventually be Canada to the north. Everything from monument sized boulders to the finest of silt lay in random heaps and irregular valleys, the land created in the aftermath of ice lay like an unmade bed waiting for new tenants. Seeds carried south with the glaciers or blown in later on errant winds took root and gradually the heaps became gently rounded hills and ridges with deep blue lakes formed by deserted blocks of ice rippling at their bases.

For as long as there had been a continent water had started here on its downward run to the sea. Seeping from springs where cow slips and pitcher plants grew lush and thick near the mossy bases of countless rocky clay filled slopes, it gathered in cattail sloughs, to mix with snow melt and rain to form tiny creeks. The creeks found shallow streams and wound through white cedar, pines, and mixes of hardwoods, which in their haphazard way intertwined. Sending outthrust branches, twigs, and leaves into neighboring limbs to form a loosely woven tapestry of color, textures and shapes, spreading over hills and across glacial valleys as deep quiet forests. Occasionally creeks abandoned their burdens in lakes to join with the water from other streams. Even in resting the water obeyed the slope of the continent and sought out a low spot where it could become a river. Moving southwards it merged or swallowed up other rivers eventually forming into one that had the power to shape what had been the fertile center of a nation. In its journey south sand moved and silt settled, during droughts plants found root in the river bed, to be washed away in one hundred year floods that now spread across expanding flood plains several times each year. Dirt levies that had checked the rivers flow for many years became dwindling islands carried away in clouds of swirling mud and tumbling water swept trees as torrential rains cooking off the surface of expanding oceans fell on the hard sun baked earth. Humans still farmed the margins of the river; isolated families bravely held onto plots of land and lived as much from vegetable gardens or hunting and gathering as they did from grain fields dry and cracked, or under water. The less brave formed fortressed communities and tilled up patches near enough to their walls to protect the crops from the many species of raiders that roamed the wilds. Given enough time city states would use the power derived from bread and cereal to claim hegemony and carve out territory as order evolved into law.

Everyone had times when remembering the past brought moments of brief intense happiness. Tastes of prepared food; the unimaginable abundance of malls and super markets full of things to buy, the freedom of speeding down a highway, and most of all a sense that the bad things were only stories from the six o'clock news; things happening to someone else. To people no one even knew. Those memories usually started out nice, comfortably nostalgic. They were traitorous things which entered the mind like the healing thoughts of someone long from home trying to hold onto something they hoped to return to. There was no going back. Even the racial purists, using god and blame to prop up the righteousness of their hate, thought we had done too much damage; they felt the best we could do was extract terrible revenge for unpunished crimes. Savoring memories is quickly replaced by anger towards whoever you have decided is to blame for the downfall of the species, or self hatred, if you examine the part your personal wastefulness had taken in the squandering of the future.

The man had been dead a long time, long enough that the smell of death had dissipated into something more like a suggestion, the ghost of a smell. Finly was remembering the ghost of skunk smells and passing by them in his Lexus. How they had almost a minty smell, not unpleasant at all at seventy miles an hour. He so missed the joy of commanding his luxury four wheel drive down an open highway and whizzing by a sun dried road kill, not needing to pause beside them, or to consider the impartiality of death. But here it was, a fairly good pair of Dexter Hiking Boots laced to a man so long dead that the smell of him instead of nauseating Finly, made him remember good times from the past. He knew they would fit, once long ago he had owned a pair just like them. One Hundred and Fifty Bucks back then, when most of the hiking he did was on mapped out walking trails, or in shopping malls. He couldn’t have said what had happened to them even if there was someone near to say it to. Like so many things from before once he possessed them the importance of buying was replaced with the need to treat himself to something new. Running shoes, the same brand the winner of the Boston Marathon that year had worn. Finly hadn’t been a runner, but he had thought about doing some jogging after watching part of a 10K race go by his condo, and that had made the running shoes nearly a must have. He remembered where those shoes were, or at least where he had left them.

The dead man’s Dexter’s still had excellent tread and good leather uppers. To have held up in the rains and snows the corpse had to have treated them with some sort of silicon water proofer. He smiled at the thought of trying an idea like this on Hal. Hal had been his boss. The owner of the last ad agency Finly had worked for. They would have done it as a Mad Max silicon spray for the post apocalyptic world. Someone would have bought it. Finly had possessed an instinct for that sort of thing. It was his job to convince people in the presence of overwhelming evidence of the undoing of the very threads of global life that they really didn't need to change their buying habits. That somehow we could spend our way out of nearly anything. He reached out and untied the laces of the boots. Stripping the dead came easy now. During the trek away from the ocean he had seen so many worse things done to them that taking much needed footwear wasn’t even something one paused to debate. The right boot came off easily, leaving parts of a sock still clinging to the bony toes. He shook it around upside down and banged it on a nearby rock to make sure everything had come out. A folded up wad of Hundred Dollar Bills fell out. If they hadn’t been so stuck together they would have been worth keeping as toilet paper. That the man had wanted to hide them confirmed Finly’s suspicion that the man had died early in the exodus. The left boot didn’t hold any hidden treasure, but the man’s shirt pocket did have a document which looked forged saying that Henry Thurbes was a life time resident of Ohio and entitled to travel in that state. Inside the papers was a snapshot of two children, a girl in her awkward teens and a boy several years younger. The absence of a mother in the picture established for Finly that the man and his family represented the demographics it was most profitable to target. Children being raised by a single parent, it didn’t matter which parent, being bought off with things to patch up the holes in time, and to buy preeminence over their one time spouse now competitor in the things race. That the corpse was in Minnesota with fake Ohio ID suggested he had been somewhere on the West Coast when things fell apart out there and had decided to head to Ohio, probably where his wife was with custody of the kids. The neat round hole in his mummified skull explained why his pilgrimage had ended unsuccessfully.

On the back of the photo it said Robin 13 and Sam 9 Sept15. The hand writing was beautiful and the legend thoughtful which told Finly that they had parted on better terms than he had with either of his wives. Several times a day since the bad times had started he was thankful that he didn’t have pictures of children to carry. It didn’t release him from the guilt he felt for his part in the apocalypse but it gave him less to worry about.

Up above on the road all was quiet. Spock lay curled up several feet from the corpse alternately chewing and then licking his paws. When he realized Finly was watching him his ears pointed up and he stared back with the haughty, disapproving expression which along with the pointy ears had suggested the name Finly had given him. Spock had started traveling with Finly in Oklahoma. They were the same. Wiry, non-threatening survivors, who knew when to lie down and yelp if needed, but preferring to run and hide, which was what they were doing at that moment. What had placed them at the bottom of this road ditch and rewarded Finly with better footwear. He slipped off the dress shoes he had found in the J.C. Penny’s a week earlier and sat them beside the dead man. Everything impractical was still available for the taking in any department store. The clerks gone, and the only problem was digging through the rubble of merchandise left after a thousand lootings, and the good chance of running into someone with the idea that you might have something worth stealing. Finly made it a point to always appear to have very little worth going through the bother of robbing him for. In the new world like the old one there were the people who took and the people who either gave or hid. At nearly sixty Finly considered himself lucky when he could get out of the way to hide.

From the start of their companionship Spock refused to walk at Finly’s side. The dog would trot from ditch to ditch many yards ahead of him looking back frequently making sure the man was still in sight. If Spock disappeared Finly immediately got off the road and looked for a spot to crawl into or behind. Not always, but often enough to keep him jumpy, a group of foragers would come down the road, as they did today. Spock was Finly’s edge. His only ally in what was usually a hostile world. Finly was also sure that to Spock, Finly was only handy at opening up the cans of food they were lucky enough to find, and at shooting animals too fast or big for him to catch.

It had been a routine execution there would be no food. The dead man had been ordered to drop his back pack, and to the edge of the road. The exit wound was clearly to the back of the skull. Henry Thurbes had known what was going to happen to him. Had looked into his killers eyes and known he wasn’t going to make it to Ohio. Whoever had done the killing had rolled him off the road and gone on their way with whatever Mr. Thurbes had carried. The money still in the boot made Finly think it was simply a case of murder and robbery. If the State Militia had stopped him he would have at least had a chance to pull out the money and the fake papers, at least had a chance to offer a bribe before being shot. This had been a rush job. Kill and take what you can and then move on. Not that it mattered much who had ended Henry’s life, but Finly liked to work these things out in his head. He had no place to go, nobody really did anymore. Humanity had gotten its start chasing vultures away from the remnants of a better hunter’s kill. It seemed only fitting that the survivors should end up picking through the debris of their vanished civilization for bits and pieces of consumable goods. Products which they had worshipped and then let destroy them. Finly didn’t even try convincing himself anymore that the production of those goods kept the economy running and made life better for everyone. There wasn’t anyone left to tell the lie to, no one to convince that it was a necessary trade, environment for progress, jobs or clean air, that by recycling the things we were tired of, we could keep selling each other the things we craved, but didn’t need.

Finly wiggled his toes and studied the patch work of cloth covering his foot. Plastic bags stuffed full of cotton socks, overflowing bins full of them. Taken for granted and tossed away with the first sign of wear, God how he had loved the feel of new socks. He brooded over every decent pair of them he had thrown away, because of even slight discoloring, and slid his foot into the dead man’s boot. They were a little big and the leather hard from the sun and whatever process had gone on inside of them to reduce the man’s fleshy foot to a claw of yellowed skin and bone. The left one was a little tighter, almost a perfect fit. With an extra pair of socks it would be perfect.

I’ll just have to pick up an eight pack the next time we stop by the mall. He said it quietly, with the same tone he used to gently curse and insult Spock. The dog looked up and wagged its tail. Maybe I’ll get Hanes, with the gray heals and toes. Now wouldn’t that look sharp? Spock went back to his own foot care and ignored the man. If he would have listened to him during their years of travel the dog would have heard everything from self condemnation to total denial of responsibility, for Finly’s in particular, and mankind in general’s part in the global tragedy, a total history of human abuses to the Earth and air. With human disregard to most of the clear orders from God, (via whichever conduit of his word their race, creed, or nationality had decided was the one true Will of The Creator), people had decided that being fruitful and multiplying was the one rule they could live with. Somehow they figured there were reasons to fudge on the basics about respecting and caring for one another and wise stewardship of the Earth, but there was something in the begetting which had forever appealed to them. In due course they had bred themselves to the brink of extinction. In many ways Finly had comforted himself with the knowledge that this was God’s Will, and clearly not his fault.

He remembered weather reports when consistent weather patterns were ascribed to the naughty antics of Hispanic children shaping in the Pacific Ocean and dominating climates everywhere. With maps and graphs experts explained that this wasn’t Global Warming, that in fact there wasn’t enough data available to predict if the Greenhouse Effect even existed. People were assured that El-Nino and La-Nina were uncommon but predictable patterns which developed if just the right circumstances existed. They then took a break and sold high performance automobiles guaranteed to go from zero to sixty in just a matter of seconds, and little ovens which would put a bag of freshly popped corn in your hands seconds faster than the latest development in micro-wave technology from last year.

Wouldn’t a bag of popcorn hit the spot just now, one with lots of butter? Spock ignored him. Finly reached over for his back pack and Spock looked up. You greedy bastard! Spock thumped his tail in complete agreement. Finly untied the cords holding the top shut and stuffed the Wing Tips into the tightly stuffed bag. The pack and its contents, the sleeping bag tied along the pack frames bottom edge, and a single shot 22 rifle, all that he owned was right here. It was also all that he could possibly carry, and now with the corpse boots still smelling faintly of death he really had everything he could want. A huge condominium with a storage unit and garage hadn’t been able to do that ten years ago.

The continued quiet from the road and the sadness of the body with pictures of its one time owners children resting on the skeletal chest made Finly feel like climbing back up to the highway. He picked up the snapshots. If someone stopped him he could give them a story. A father lost to his children in the chaos, searching for them in the devastation. He looked at them again and then tucked the pictures under the tattered remains of the dead man’s shirt, over its heart. He was so tired of lies, of the things he convinced himself were ok as long as he saw a benefit. The plastic watch on the man’s wrist beeped out a reminder to the dead to do something, Finly wondered how many times through the years it had signaled him and how long the battery would keep working, another potential for an advertisement and no one to sell it to.

He eased out to the edge of the road through a patch of hazel brush. Even tar roads were losing their definition, the ditches grown solid with small trees and sumac. Everything the summer mowing crews had kept cut back now grew unchallenged. Every crack and seam a jagged line of grass and weeds. Finly knew that within fifty years if things didn’t change highways would be odd humps which children would question and old people explain away into an unbelievable mythology of the past. The roadway was clear and Finly stepped out onto the tar slipping his back pack straps over his skinny shoulders. The group which had passed might have been a family. Harmless and full of questions about conditions in the direction he had come from. Worried about raiders, equally afraid of the strange forms of tyranny some towns had accepted, in the name of order, because of the absence of state and national government. The places blessed with any sort of consistency in a world of chaos and punishing weather tended towards a fortress mentality where everyone from outside was an enemy, and everyone inside adhered to strict rules.

So many things had gone wrong. Humans had gambled for one hundred years thinking all along that they were ahead in the game. And in the 1980’s when most people realized the World’s resource pot was light, and the environment was clearly showing the strain of industrial pollution, instead of folding we dug into our descendants account and bet everything on high tech innovations and recycling. The children and grand children of these last high rollers knew what had been done to their future and resented their ancestors. The only way Finly or anyone near his age would have been allowed into one of the areas where there was any kind of order was if they had a needed skill. This exclusion wasn’t done as a punishment but as a matter of practicality. Finly’s only marketable skill was bullshitting and although it came in handy every so often few people had much use for it anymore.

A woodchuck piped a sharp short whistle nearby. Finly un-slung his rifle and sat down under the sumac which bordered the road. He watched in the direction of the sound and waited. Spock curled up, still, except for the bright eyed stare that shifted with any movement made by the man. Nearly fifty yards away a squat brown rodent shuffled around in the tall grass and weeds grown up in the road. It stood up on its hind legs and looked around in the late summer air. Finly lined up the sights of the gun and a light popping crack disturbed the silence. The woodchuck flipped over kicked several times and then was still.

Finly returned the rifle to his lap, and watched as Spock charged up the road to their dinner. He slowly stood knee’s popping and joined the dog at the kill site. Later after he had butchered his overgrown rat he would cook it on a fire of twigs and watch Spock catch the tidbits he couldn't eat in whiskers grizzled by eating the entrails. He could picture it all because it was a repeat of the other days they had fed well. This was a good day, a dead man’s boots on his feet and a fat rodent to dine on. He thought of the investments he had made when it had seemed that even growing old could be added to the long list of the things man had considered conquered. Sitting there in the warm sunshine he realized the wealth he had socked away in IRA’s and the stock market, the growth he measured each day as the DOW reports hit the news had entwined him in a silent conspiracy to place him in this future he had shared in creating. The seas now sloshed at new coasts three feet higher than before and he could well remember feeling alarmed when this had been predicted. They had said it would take one hundred years for this to happen and that had seemed far away, so he had thought it didn’t sound too good, but even with the genetic research into taking cells from unborn fetuses to enhance our life span he really wouldn’t have to worry about what happened in one hundred years. And for every expert saying what might happen, there was another to call them