The Nationwide Sligger Emergency and Extermination Campaign in the United States was the escalating, multi-agency effort to locate and destroy Sliggers after their spread proved too broad for isolated local responses. A second wave along the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River transformed a coastal crisis into a national emergency: troops were divided among Texas, Florida, and the Mississippi corridor, while police and civilian hunters searched shorelines and waterways. The campaign’s ambition was national, but its method was painstakingly local—search every bank, culvert, sewer, and other possible hiding place, then dispose of the creatures so their mutations could not continue to threaten the ecosystem.

From Coastal Outbreak to National Threat

The case for a wider response emerged as reports accumulated from distant locations. After an attack on a campground in Georgia and clear video of Sligger eggs on a Florida beach at St. Augustine, Denise Baddington concluded that the sites were too far apart to belong to one nest. Multiple nests and creatures, she warned, could be scattered along the coast, with their locations unknown until they attacked. Her assessment shifted the problem from containing a single outbreak to anticipating many simultaneous ones. Eaver Robinson asked whether a government contact could issue a national warning; Denise identified Gina Taylor, her contact at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as someone she could notify.

The spread also unsettled communities that had already experienced an attack. In Sweetboro, South Carolina, residents heard that Sliggers had appeared at multiple East Coast locations while the town’s own previous attack remained fresh in memory. Some locked their homes and drove inland to stay with relatives or friends; others boarded windows, fortified doors, stocked ammunition, and cleaned their guns. Mason Parker went among his constituents to reassure them that he would not let the creatures gain a foothold on the town’s shores. He asked residents to watch for eggs or nesting signs near the water, but directed them to report discoveries to him and leave the danger to the sheriff’s department and his deputies.

National news broadcasts and social media widened public awareness. People were advised to remain inside at night and avoid the water until authorities declared areas safe. Some responded with jokes and monster-movie memes; others organized East Coast hunting groups. The two responses—humor and armed volunteer action—appeared side by side as people tried to make sense of a threat that was both frightening and geographically diffuse.

Local Searches and Civilian Participation

The campaign’s volunteer dimension took shape before the federal mobilization reached its fullest scale. In Savannah, police concentrated along the Savannah River after the campground attack on Jekyll Island. Civilian hunters, meanwhile, organized to search beyond populated areas, where they could carry guns without interfering with law enforcement activity. Molly Foster, raised in a military family and taught to hunt by her father, assembled friends for an armed search. She brought her shotgun; the group wore chest waders for the stretches where they expected to move through water.

After dark, six hunters set out near Old Fort Jackson, moving east along the Savannah River. They searched the riprap shoreline, passed the wooded stretch beyond the fort, and continued toward the SeaPoint Industrial Terminal. The fort’s tightly packed rocks and the terminal’s similarly dense banks offered little room for a large animal to nest, so they searched those sections quickly. The route shows the practical demands of civilian participation: volunteers had to judge likely habitat, work around security and populated areas, and cover a long river system whose inlets and islands multiplied the search area.

When Molly’s group encountered and destroyed Sligger nests, she called the police, gave the location of the bodies for disposal, and waited for officers rather than continuing downriver. They were already two miles from their vehicles, and the remaining distance to the Atlantic Ocean was another ten miles, before accounting for the inlets and island shores. Molly recognized that even one river search could take months. Later, after the national emergency was declared, she called Deputy Norman Linneman, who had responded on three previous occasions to clean up after her group’s river searches. Their repeated contact illustrates how volunteer work could become a continuing partnership with local police: hunters found and destroyed nests, while officers responded to the resulting scenes.

Federal Emergency and Deployment Plan

The crisis expanded again when reports placed Sliggers in the Gulf of Mexico, including Alabama and Louisiana, and along the Mississippi River. In a discussion of the western spread, Ron Tully and his colleagues concluded that coastal currents had carried the creatures eastward from somewhere farther west. Texas was then the furthest-west reported point, at Port Arthur, on the Texas–Louisiana border. Ron considered the Mississippi the most pressing route of expansion and proposed dividing the forces into three parts: one third to begin at Port Arthur, one third to continue westward from Florida, and one third to reach the Mississippi immediately and follow the creatures upriver.

The president’s televised declaration of a National State of Emergency made the federal escalation public. The announcement said that Army Reserve troops would assist the National Guard in eradicating the creatures. When Molly asked how the situation had become so serious after the East Coast effort appeared to be succeeding, Linneman explained that attacks had appeared around the Gulf and along the Mississippi. Because that river reaches far into the country, containment now required a much broader sweep. Law enforcement and military personnel would begin along the Gulf Coast, while other forces searched the coast and rivers feeding into the ocean. The stated scope extended to every waterway, culvert, sewer, cave, and forest that might conceal the creatures.

The deployment reflected Ron’s three-part strategy. In New Orleans, Sergeant Billingsly briefed National Guard troops on the danger of the Sliggers’ toxic appendages and ordered them killed without explosives, following Denise’s warning. His unit was assigned to clear the area from New Orleans up the Mississippi River, while two infantry divisions advanced from Florida and Texas. Ron judged the plan well suited to containing and eliminating the invasive species. At the wharf, Billingsly distributed handguns and ample ammunition magazines to the federal visitors accompanying his unit. The New Orleans Police Department joined the operation, working culverts and crevices farther from shore as the Guard searched the water’s edge.

A separate coastal search shows the same emphasis on coordinated, systematic coverage. Twenty deputies walked in a line, examining a strip extending one hundred feet inland from the shoreline and moving together across the ground. Sheriff David Mittenfeld joined the line with his four visitors. This method turned an open-ended search into a defined sweep, but the scale of the coastline and connected waterways meant that the work had to be repeated across many areas.

Eradication, Disposal, and the Limits of Scale

Destroying visible creatures was only one part of the response. The campaign treated their remains as an ecological hazard: Linneman told Molly that the same protocol used on the coast would apply elsewhere, with bodies collected and burned so that mutations could not continue to affect the ecosystem. Molly agreed that disposal was necessary to prevent further mutation. That rule connected field operations to the suspected origin of the creatures. Denise’s tissue analysis had not identified them conclusively, and tests on residue from the Nazi U-boat beneath Wrecker Island were still pending. She suspected the substance might have been created to induce genetic mutation; the possibility that Sliggers acquired traits from the marine animals they ate offered a provisional explanation, not a confirmed finding.

The campaign therefore confronted two kinds of uncertainty at once: where the creatures were and how far their biological effects might extend. The coastal-current explanation offered a route to follow, while the existence of multiple nests and the appearance of a Gulf wave warned that sightings could not define the full extent of the infestation. Even with local police, National Guard troops, federal personnel, and volunteers working together, the terrain resisted neat boundaries. Molly pointed out that the wetlands around New Orleans seemed almost infinite, and that searching them all would be an ordeal. The national response could bring people and weapons to the field quickly, but its success depended on exhausting a landscape of interconnected rivers, shores, and hidden spaces—a task whose magnitude the book leaves visible even as the sweep begins.