Evidently Adele’s navigational skills were off.

When she emerged from the other side of the looking-glass, exhausted from the journey and damp with mirror residue — stuff less like water than slime, which thankfully evaporated without any trace after a few minutes — she found herself assaulted by an almost unbearable stench. If hell had an odour — all brimstone and sulphur and putrefied corpses basking in triple-digit heat — this would be it.

“Oh shi—” began Danah, cut off by a bout of choked gagging.

Look at who decided to join me after all. Adele would have made a proper snide remark at that moment, but instead preoccupied herself with plugging her nose and breathing as sparingly as possible while simultaneously taking stock of where they were.

As far as she could tell in the near-blackness, they stood in a wasteland. Or rather, in a long corridor formed by the hills of refuse and debris on either side of them. The mirror they had escaped through was in impressive shape given the rubbish heap it poked out of, rusted and clouded with filth but otherwise in one piece.

“Why does it smell so terrible?” asked Magnus, one hand cupping his nose and the other on his stomach. “This is horrific.”

“You don’t want to know.” Danah gestured with her head down the valley of garbage, then began to meander away. What meagre light they had came from this direction, from something very bright glowing in the horizon like a sickly sun. “The exit is this way.”

Adele’s voice was nasal, certain consonants buzzing in her head like wasps, but she didn’t care to remove her thumb and forefinger from their pinch-grip on her nostrils. “How do you know that?”

Danah had covered her nose and mouth with her shirt, but her smirk remained evident; there was a sharp glint in her eyes when she glanced back at Adele. Then again, that could have been the foul smell causing her eyes to water.

Everyone fell silent, striding between the mountains of garbage at as hurried a pace as they could muster — which was quite the undertaking given they were breathing as little as humanly capable. Only Adair appeared not to be bothered by the repugnant smell, trotting behind the other three with short pauses to inspect a bicycle wheel or refrigerator door or leg-less armchair with stuffing leaking and dingy brown. There was everything and anything in the landfill, including the kitchen sink — several, in fact.

After what felt like hours but had, in actuality, been only twenty or so minutes, the city came into view. Soon after, the meaning of the term “Lowsider” — something she had been called with such derision and revulsion by the shopkeeper in the city — became obvious to Adele.

Beyond the mountains of trash, scarcely meters away, a settlement had been developed out of shacks and tents, clinging to the exterior wall of the city like barnacles to a stone. The wall was as tall as twenty or thirty storeys in a regular building and made of sleek steel, dented along the bottom but otherwise smooth and seamless. No human could climb it, or even hope to climb it.

Which made Adele wonder why they would ever think she could be a Lowsider, for she saw no way for any of those in the settlements to enter the city at all, unless they had industrial-grade welding tools or could invent the world’s first hover car.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, releasing hold of her nose. The smell was less intense here, mingling with the smog from the city.

“Very observant.” Magnus looked pale and washed-out in the flood of light from the city, gleaming with sweat and what had yet to dry from the mirror. “Let’s get going.”

They had yet to question Adele regarding the mirror, but she supposed they had more important things on their minds. Escaping the landfill, for example, and finding a way back into the city. As they walked, she began to worry about the things she didn’t know about. Both Magnus and Danah were visibly nervous, glancing around themselves with every step as if the shadows might reach out and grab them. Even Adair had calmed down now that they were outside of the landfill, mouth in a taut line and gaze forward.

She was so absorbed in figuring what could possibly have them all so tense that it took her several minutes to realize something very important: the settlements were empty. Every shack and every tent looked to not have been lived in for years.

“Where are the people?” she asked, hesitant to speak above a whisper, frightened already of the answer and of what the empty shacks signified.

“Probably dead,” said Adair.

“Oh,” said Adele, and then she said something else not terribly ladylike but equally monosyllabic.

“Stay quiet and hopefully they won’t find us,” Danah hissed.

“But Adair just said they were—” Realization occurred mid-sentence. Adele had been to far too many worlds not to know what Danah meant. “Oh.”

Because having escaped through a mirror into a wasteland hadn’t been terrible enough thus far, walking dead had to be added to the bill as well.

“How much farther do we have to go?” asked Adair. He remained in the back of their group, posture hunched and hands stuffed in his pockets. On anyone else it would have appeared casual. He looked as if he was trying to create as slim and compact a line as possible, shrinking into himself or perhaps away from everyone else.

“Not far,” said Danah, focussed forward.

“Good,” said Adair. “Because we don’t have much time left.”

She swung around so quickly that she nearly whipped an elbow into Adele, who narrowly missed being swiped by the offending limb. Danah stumbled, caught herself, and then soldiered on.

Everyone moved at a quicker pace after that, practically sprinting along the dried earth. Of course, when you have four terrified persons rushing along, eventually someone is going to make a mistake.

The crash was like gunfire in the silence. Magnus had slammed his boot into a piece of wayward scrap metal, following the sudden noise with a very loud curse. Danah snapped at him to be quiet, but it was too late. The damage had been done.

They found the first standing in their path, wavering from side to side like a drunkard and moaning softly. The extent of decomposition was such that it was scarcely human, reduced to thin yellowed flesh over bone, largely naked but for a few scraps of fabric that may or may not have once been a clothing. Or a bedsheet. Maybe even a curtain.

Adele didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but that thing standing before them was certainly not it. As they stood gaping, a clod of rot slithered from the thing’s shoulder and landed with a wet plop in the dirt.

“It’s a slow one,” said Danah. “Move around it.”

“Slow one?” echoed Adele. “You mean there are fast ones?!”

No one answered. She didn’t take it personally. They had better things to worry about than explaining to the newbie all the various definitions of zombie.

They gave the thing in their way a wide berth, slowly and carefully. Not that it was in any condition to lunge after them. If it tried to grab for them, the arm would probably fall off. Once they were several feet away, they picked up speed until they were running, racing past crumbling shacks and collapsed tents.

Adele had no idea where they were going. Most frightening of all, she couldn’t tell if anyone else had any either. Did they run in a certain direction, or for the sake of running as far from the dead as possible?

Dead-ish, anyway, she told herself.

Four pairs of boots and sneakers pounded the dirt, and four sets of lungs heaved for breath in polluted air. Adele felt dizzy with exhilaration and terror, two things she knew all too well. So dizzy she didn’t realize when the chase had actually begun, when their footsteps had ceased to be the only ones in the wasteland.

Ahead of her, Magnus shouted a curse. They had to dodge several more of the slow ones — lumbering, sluggish creatures that could only stare blankly at them as they passed, reaching out with disfigured and skeletal fingertips, ineffectual monsters reduced to little more than obstacles.

Sharp pain sliced beneath her diaphragm as her gut began to seize. Her pace had slowed and she chose that moment to cast an askance glance over her shoulder.

What a foolish mistake she made.

They were bloodshot eyes and concave skulls, twisted arms and dislocated shoulders. Great chunks of flesh were missing from several bodies, as if they had begun to resort to undead cannibalism in order to feed. Several had gaping wounds where stomachs and entrails should have been, displaying spinal cords and ribcages, yellow bone against blackened and greyed flesh.

And most horrific of all, they were scant meters away. They could run just as fast, with or without all their internal organs.

Adair grabbed her hand, squeezing tightly, forcing her attention forward. Forcing her forward, and at a better pace. “Don’t look.”

Too late. She had no breath to say it aloud.

Ahead of them, Danah pointed into the distance. A tilted construct rose out of the ground, little more than a shack on stilts, manmade and questionably upright.

“We’ll — have to — double around — a few times,” Magnus said, sentence broken by intermittent pants for air.

When Adele glanced his way, Adair had gone white. His grip on her hand loosened, and that was when she stopped running.

She had no moment to catch her breath. With every inch of focus, she devised a great wall. Electricity poured from her ring, flickering streams of light that spread wider than they did high. Enough to temporarily prevent the zombie hoard from overtaking them for the seconds it took the others to climb the tilted tower.

“Adele! You idiot!”

Adair grabbed her again by the hand, hauling her away so roughly she heard something creak in her shoulder. The wall fizzled, threatening to shimmer away into nothingness. She had no chance to see if it did; they raced for the tower, battery acid coursing through her muscles and boiling water pouring into her lungs.

He flung her into the ladder, which she climbed two rungs at a time until Magnus grabbed for her, pulling her the remainder of the way up. Adair scrambled after her, so desperately fast but inevitably too slow. He halted, caught by the things down below, grisly fingertips clutching to one trouser leg, his other ankle just out of grasp.

“Don’t let them—” he started, voice drowned out by the crackle of lightning careening past his head.

The ring had precious little strength remaining, sufficient to stun a few of the monsters below and allow Adair to kick free but to do little else. She, he, and Magnus yanked up the ladder before the zombies could discover how to climb, tying it in place with a strap of leather.

Danah already had collapsed and so they followed suit, crumpling into several undignified heaps. The metal floor bit into every aching joint in Adele’s body. She couldn’t have cared less. She wanted to lay there forever.

“I propose,” said Magnus, once his breath had returned to him, “that we never do that ever, ever again.”

“I can’t say that was the plan, Mags,” Danah said.

There was a moment of awkward silence, filled only by the plaintive cries and groans of the creatures down below, and then Adair asked, “Do you think they have any tea up here?”