Roads belonged to the living and the dead. I was very tired, having fought two battles without sleep. My closed wounds ached, the healing slowing as it progressed. I don't remember falling into a dream, but it was waiting for me.

The convoy moved expediently towards our next target, well over a day and a night along the roads. I slept, ignoring the movement of the bus as it jostled along. Bruna was lying across the seat in front of me, and another pack member was in the seat behind me. We filled the whole bus, all of us asleep. The drivers switched places with passengers, but I was not given a turn.

It was those dreams that I remember. In those dreams, the pack was as proper wolves, large sleek animals with clean fur and wisdom in their glowing eyes. It was in a darkened field, with a sky that was almost white with stars. They lounged and played and ran and leaped through the grass and flowers. There were a thousand wonderful smells and pools of clear and satisfying water to drink from.

Bruna trotted up beside me, her tail waving back and forth. "Do you like it here?" she asked with her eyes.

"This is a dream." I laughed with my wolf smile.

"Yes, but everyone is here. The whole pack." Bruna looked around and I followed her gaze. She was right, I saw the lieutenant colonel, Halo, Treach, Slate, Abbot, Seyfried, Connor and the newest wolves in our pack.

"We are all asleep and dreaming this same dream?" I asked with my tongue hanging from my wolf jaws.

"Yes. That is why it is so good." Bruna nudged me.

"And you say so, you are the mother to the whole pack. The alpha female." I lowered my head submissively.

"I'd never thought of it that way. I am second in command in the battalion. I don't feel like I am the mother to the whole pack. What a strange idea." Bruna's wolf teeth were grinning, and her eyes were smiling playfully. "What makes you say so?"

"Something Halo told me. We look to you for strength and guidance." I darted away from her and started running across the field. She chased after me and we ran for some distance before I stopped. I felt no fatigue, somehow even running felt like relaxing, just letting myself be the wolf.

"Don't listen to Halo. Don't you know that I look to you for strength, Atanarjuat?" Bruna's wolf tongue cleaned behind my ears, and she then lay down in the grass upon her paws. "Before you, I felt very alone. I was sad all the time. It is why I needed you to be with me at every hour of the day. When you were near me, I felt whole, there was no loneliness. You are my best friend."

"You're my best friend. Without you, Ravenrock would have held me as a prison and the pain of my losses would bury me alive as a grave." I lay down beside her in the grass on my paws.

"You and I are very close. We share a bond. It is good - I chose you and you accepted me. That's the best. Halo was a fool, he wanted me to choose him, but I did not. There was a time, in my loneliness, when I might have chosen him, but he left." Bruna told me what happened with Halo with her glowing wolf eyes blinking. I had already guessed as much.

"I'm sorry you spent so much of your life alone." I spoke back with my wolf eyes.

"I am sorry that you lost those that you loved before you met me." She stared back at me.

"Let's be honest - we are apologizing for benefiting from these things." I bravely twitched my ear.

"Yes. That is what we are doing. These apologies are for benefitting from what each of us suffered so that we ended up together." Bruna agreed with a whine. Her tail flopped from one side to the other, because she was very sorry.

"It's good we can be in this place. Is this how everyone feels here?" I asked as I stood back up, ready to run again.

"Of course, it is a dream, after all." Bruna quickly got on her fours and raced alongside me as we took off running.

Suddenly I was awake as the bus stopped. "There's something wrong here." Dreich had stopped the bus suddenly, his lack of driving skills evident in the way he slammed the brakes so hard. The convoy of vehicles we had taken was in a row, halted by a crude roadblock of parked cars.

I smelled death and looked out the window. There, hanging from the telephone poles were the bodies of men and women. Dreich was right, something was wrong.

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We had arrived as a man and woman knelt with their heads bowed, their hands tied behind their back. McRaze was driving the lead vehicle and got out. She started to speak to them, but they did not respond. Doctor Imbrium told McRaze to get back and she looked around at the many hiding places of the bandits and got back into the car. Doctor Imbrium had moved over to the driver's seat.

"Atanarjuat, stay behind me." Bruna told me and she held her assault rifle and got off the bus. I followed her.

Jack the Ripper was driving the second vehicle, with the bus in the back of our driving caravan. He got out and said: "Murderers work here." and gestured to the hanging dead. He went over to the man and woman and produced a knife. He cut the ropes that tied them and told them to leave. They fled, running along the road to escape whoever had captured them.

"What are you doing?" Bruna asked him.

"I do as I please. There's no collar on me. Shouldn't I have freed them?" Jack the Ripper asked with a strange flourish, pointing to his neck and reminding us we had made him wear a collar.

"Well, well, well." Said an overly confident man in a black leather jacket, a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire with the word 'Matilda' written on it, and an impolite beard that only demonstrated his poor grooming habits. I somehow got the feeling we had just heard most of his vocabulary, and that he routinely bashed in the head of anyone who used big words he didn't understand.

"Well, what?" Jack the Ripper asked him.

"Well, we can make a deal. I'm Nadir and you've come to the righteous place of the Messiahs. We keep the girl and the boy since you stole the ones we had there on the road. I'm in a good mood, so we'll let the rest of you walk away. We keep your vehicles and supplies too, I almost forgot." Nadir told Jack the Ripper.

"Is that right?" Jack the Ripper asked. "That was quite a speech you just gave. Did you rehearse it?"

"Look at all the people who annoyed me with questions." Nadir said, sounding annoyed. "Nobody annoys Nadir. Isn't that right, Matilda?" Nadir asked his bat.

"Well, that's a problem." Jack the Ripper said. "You murdered all these people after you robbed them."

"You, sir, are getting on my last nerve. You've spoiled my good mood." Nadir started walking towards Jack the Ripper, who blinked serenely behind his featureless mask. Nadir thumped the side of Jack the Ripper's car, dragged his bat along the side of it and then along the ground. I realized he was used to intimidating and abusing all the unarmed refugees he and whoever was hidden in ambush stopped.

"Get back on the bus." Bruna told me. We backed up, getting back on the bus. Bruna took the driver's seat and handed her weapon to Dreich, who was tired of driving anyway.

"I was tired of driving anyway." Dreich said.

Nadir got too close to Jack the Ripper and as he raised his bat he suddenly staggered back. Some of his blood sprayed out in an arc onto the road. Then Jack the Ripper had two knives, like sleight of hand they appeared from his sleeves. He leaned forward with lightning-quick speed and with surgical precision he plunged the points into Nadir's armpits and then pulled them out and spun the man around and slashed the tendons in his ankles.

There was a thump on the road as Nadir fell and his bat clattered away and rolled. "H-help." Nadir wasn't sure what had happened, but he was suddenly face down on the road. Jack the Ripper stuck the tip of one of his blades into Nadir's spine and drew it out. He stepped over him and left him there alive and helpless. A puddle of urine formed under Nadir.

The bus was in reverse when the ambush started. The middle vehicle of our convoy was hit in the side by a rocket and flipped onto its side, burning. It fell back down. A second rocket hit the road under it and lifted it slightly into the air from the explosion.

Suddenly the bandits were popping up from cover all around. They were firing their guns, shooting up the vehicle in the front. The bus had backed away down the road and we could safely deploy from it and return fire.

I took cover behind a burnt-out car on the side of the road beside Bruna and Dreich. We shot back at them, and the firefight went back and forth. McRaze was using her powers, and suddenly there was a wall of flames behind the bandits because she ruptured a barrel of fuel and it spilled into an inferno.

Adam and Frosty got off the bus and hurled large rocks from the side of the road as they advanced. They kept missing until they got close, then a particularly large rock Adam threw smashed the head of one of the bandits and he fell dead. Frosty picked up a burning piece of the vehicle and outdid Adam by impaling a bandit of his own.

The bandits were pinned down by our firepower, surprised by such a heavily armed group. Two of them got into one of the vehicles blocking our path and moved it out of our way as they tried to escape. They were driving away, but there was no escape.

McRaze was watching them intently and a short distance down the road the vehicle slowed and swerved off to one side and crashed. A few seconds later the windows of the cab blew out from the intense heat and smoke came pouring out. The door opened and one of the bandits ran across the road screaming and flailing and on fire, only to collapse a short distance from the vehicle, which then also burned.

Adam and Frosty approached the remaining bandits who had run out of ammunition and pulled machetes and hatchets from their belts. Adam swatted one aside, took the blade he'd held, and drove it through the next. The impaled bandit tried to swing his hatchet, but Adam stopped it by catching the hatchet by its handle, and with his grip, he snapped the haft in two.

Frosty picked up a bandit and just threw him as far as he could and the man skipped and skidded along the road, worse than being flung in a traffic accident. He just lay there moaning in pain. There was a streak of blood and clothing along the road where he had landed.

The last bandit turned and ran but Jack the Ripper was standing there as he turned around. I didn't see what Jack the Ripper did to him, but it was quick. The bandit lay there immobilized and barely bleeding.

"Let's go, time to move." Lieutenant Colonel Rose ordered. We hurried back to the bus and as the lead car drove through the opening in the barricade, the bus followed with him driving.

We left the bandit camp burning behind us and continued on our way.