hills.'
'I always liked the sea.'
'Does it matter?'
'Not one bit. There're plenty out there just like us.'
I pushed the stiff lever into gear and pulled the truck away from the kerbside - funny how they'd all been waiting safely out of the road - and we rolled onto the bridge. As ever, the river beneath us was silver with specks of dazzling gold.
For no particular reason - old habits again? - I glanced into my wing mirror and my foot almost slipped off the accelerator. Without saying anything to Cissie, I stuck my head out the window, looking back. I wasn't sure what I was searching for at first, it seemed so, well, so out of place. Then I grinned. It was, it really was.
The zebra - yeah, four legs and a whole lot of black and white stripes - was ambling across the broad road some distance behind us, heading, I figured, for the overgrown green in Parliament Square. I ducked back inside the cab again, just in time to swerve round a Ford parked in the very middle of the bridge.
'What are you grinning at, Hoke?' Cissie was still smiling herself.
'Nothing,' I told her. 'Nothing at all.'
And maybe that zebra was nothing. It set me thinking though. And hoping too. Although I had no idea what I was hoping for.
- James Herbert
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Where possible, I've stuck to the facts, but in instances such as the escape along the Tube line between Holborn and the Aldwych, which was in truth closed down during the war years, I've allowed the story to stretch the actuality. There also appears to be some confusion between the experts as to whether trams were allowed to run through the tunnel beneath Kingsway during those dangerous years, so again I've opted for artistic licence (or not, whichever the case may be). Most other details should be accurate, but please forgive any mistakes I'm bound to have made and certain elaborations used for the sake of dramatization.
JAMES HERBERT Sussex, 1996
