7-Journey Through the States

Two days later, the Echidnas walked through the border with Chaos at their forefront. They traveled through the city of Brownsville, Texas. There were enough of them that it only took half an hour to get the humanoid animals in the town. Only one of the humans was foolish enough to resist, and he was quickly knocked out.

"Oh no you don't!" he had said. "That there rabbit's my property!"

Skullbash, who had been the one about to free the rabbit in question, had replied, "No, she isn't."

"Yes it is!" the man had shouted. "I bought it, fair and..."

At that point, Skullbash had rushed up to him and...well, bashed his skull, which immediately knocked him out.

Their entire journey was similarly easy. In fact, by the time they had cleared Texas, they had picked up enough people to split into multiple groups, with a few Echidnas per group to lead and fight any aggressors, so that they could free several towns at once. Once they had cleared the continental states (plus DC) they "borrowed" planes in order to get to the four other states (The non-continental US states at the time were Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Islandia.) and then met back in Texas. There, they were surprised to see that an angry mob had formed. Instead of the stereotypical everyday objects being used as weapons, they had guns. Machine guns, some of them, and they appeared to know how to use them.

"Haven't they learned their lesson?" murmured Libertor, but he sounded worried. The Echidnas may be bulletproof, but most of them were not Echidnas, and there were not enough Echidnas to protect from an attack and go attack the humans. The Echidnas did have their weak spots, after all...the weak eyes, the opening mouth...

"I'll take care of this."

Libertor turned to see Chaos.

"That may work...are you bulletproof?"

"Have you ever seen someone shoot into the water before?" came Sparks' voice. "It decelerates very, very fast."

"At any rate," said Chaos, "I only have one vital organ." He gestured toward his brain.

"Okay," said Libertor. "Go get 'em."

Libertor remembered the day, not so long ago, when he had watched Sparks, Mole, Shadow, and Fortum attack the humans. They had impressed him. Chaos was better. He absorbed all shots fired at him without pausing, and incapacitated two humans at a time, twice per second. It took perhaps fifteen seconds for him to clear the way.

The animals were worried because they had heard the land beyond the US had been bombed repeatedly. They were surprised to find that the land beyond the border felt no different, aside from the fact that there was no life but for insects.

Finally, a fox pup named Hannah couldn't hold in her curiosity.

"Excuse me, mister Echidna?" she said to Sparks. "Isn't deadly radiation supposed to cover Mexico and Central and South America?"

"It did," he said, surprised that the child, who had to be no older than four, knew a word like "radiation." "But then Chaos here," he gestured toward the liquid life-form, "went ahead of us when we came, calming the radiation on the path so that what remains is less powerful than the stuff TVs give off."

"Wow," said the fox. "What is he?"

"We don't really know," said Sparks truthfully.

They traveled for days until at last the group reached the village that would become the capitol of the Great Tribe: Detwelf, which Skullbash named.