War with the Slugs (standard:horror, 2123 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Apr 21 2009	Views/Reads: 3120/2039	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Washington State is famous for its voracious and intimidating slugs. When civilization collapsed, overrun with slugs, here's how we managed to put a stop to it. You would have loved being a part of this adventure.

WAR WITH THE SLUGS 

I filled the magazine with gasoline and clipped it into the gas-gun. 
This was the latest: a long-nosed pistol that held 116 rounds, with a 
metering cartridge that charged a firing chamber with liquid gasoline.  
The thrust reverser gleaned enough energy from each round fired to 
compress the firing chamber with air at 150 pounds per square inch.  
The trigger was, of course, a magneto, providing the spark.  When held 
down, it fired four rounds a second for nearly thirty seconds.  It was 
a light, playful weapon for long-range fast-moving targets, and a 
fearsome one at short range. 

The gas-gun had lots of advantages: fuel came from any service station,
or even an abandoned auto.  Ammunition was universal: coat hanger wire. 
 To make bullets, you only had to clip off an inch or so, crimp it with 
a hand tool that created three articulations, and load the gun-clip.  
When one of these "bullets" hit its mark, it folded up into misaligned 
quarter-inch segments and tore a hole in the target as big as a golf 
ball.  Disabling, to say the least, with lots of stopping power.  The 
long aluminum barrel, lined with molybdenum sheet, never seemed to get 
hot.  Despite its crude ammunition, the gas-gun had pinpoint accuracy 
at 475 yards. 

Nobody remembers when the enemy began infiltrating.  It was at least a
couple of generations ago.  But everyone said the same thing.  "You 
take things for granted, you let them go too far, and it's out of 
control.  Then, of course, it's too late." Maybe I'm a little fanatic, 
but I had to fight them when I was in my cradle.  I'm a veteran -- 
we're all veterans.  Sick to death of fighting, never able to give up, 
watching relatives and friends go under when you least expect it.  
Staying alert wasn't enough.  You had to be armed. 

A few microfilms are still around.  They tell the story of early
uprisings.  In school we used to read about slug migrations from the 
State of Washington -- flowing across Oregon and Northern California 
like glaciers, like lava.  Some of these carpets of undulating 
protoplasm were 50 miles wide and five hundred slugs thick! 

They bred and multiplied  en route,  consuming every particle of organic
material in their path.  Bear in mind, this was half a century ago.  
Sincere and dedicated efforts were made to scoop up the slugs and add 
them to compost bins.  In the end, roving bands of slugs would devour 
the compost bins, then go on to devour the crops and livestock.  
Hundreds of forest rangers and fire fighters were sent to combat the 
advancing river of slugs.  Fire lines were set, some of them two miles 
wide, but it made no difference: the slug wave simply rolled over and 
over on itself, quenching the flames.   As leading-edge slugs were 
crushed beneath the tide, they became food for the others.  With every 
rain their numbers grew. 

Even though an individual slug may move at only 1 or 2 inches a minute,
there is an escalator effect when they're piled up that thick.  A layer 
of only 200 slugs moves at 30 feet per minute, or about 1/3 of a mile 
an hour. At five-hundred thick, the slug-wave spread from Vancouver to 
San Diego in less than six months.  The rest is history. 

There was no time at first to carry on in-depth research -- to find ways
of containing the invasion.  At least three laboratories agreed that 
the slugs had ingested some kind of growth hormone and were now able to 
replicate it -- in fact, one laboratory had kept a few hundred of the 
creatures specifically to measure the amount of new hormone production 
when they were fed a variety of nutrients.  When the laboratory was 
remodeled,  those slugs disappeared.  They multiplied,  forming 
colonies with breeding grounds everywhere. 

Numerous volunteer groups organized week-end slug hunts, since some
colonies had begun to infest small towns and suburbs.  For a while, 
they were able to manage the slug population, but a decade later, the 
situation began to get out of hand.  State legislators and even 
Congress were unable to agree on how to stem the tide.  Procrastination 
was the thief of time. 

Despite their astronomical numbers, at that time nobody thought the
slugs dangerous: they were repulsive but harmless.  Even the largest 
was no bigger than your hand.  All of that changed while I was growing 


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