Page 144 of My Undead Love Life

“I don’t know if I’m going crazy or not,” I said slowly, “but…what’s that?”

All four men followed my gaze, and we stopped walking.

For a second, no one said anything. That was the only reason I knew I wasn’t imagining it.

Luck took one careful step forward. “Please be a heated cabin. Please be a heated cabin. Please be a heated cabin.”

“That is not a cabin,” Oxi said.

“I didn’t ask you.”

We moved closer.

It made no sense, but there was a patch of green grass in the middle of everything. Not dead winter grass or weeds poking through the snow. It was vibrant green grass. A perfect square of it, maybe eight feet across, surrounded by snow. Snow dusted the edges but didn’t cover the middle. The blades shifted faintly in the wind.

“What the hell…” Luck breathed.

Oxi lifted his cane sword slightly. “That is a miracle or a trap.”

“In my experience,” Keith murmured, “miracles and traps have a big ass overlap.”

Mad stepped forward, axe in hand. “Everyone stay sharp.”

“Because we were previously relaxed in this cold?” Luck asked.

“No, Luck. Because the cold has fucked with our awareness.” Mad crouched near the grass.

Keith pulled me back half a step, positioning himself just slightly in front of me, which made Oxi give him a sideways look. Keith noticed. “Habit.”

Oxi’s mouth twitched despite the situation. “Relatable. You did it before I could.”

Mad brushed snow away from the edge of the patch. His gloved fingers pressed along the grass, then paused. His shoulders tightened.

“What?” I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately. He traced something with two fingers, slow and deliberate.

It was a seam.

Only as he cleared more snow and ice away, I realized that it wasn’t a seam in the ground. It was a seam around the grass. A perfect line hidden beneath fake soil, so clean that I wouldn’t have noticed it if Mad hadn’t been trained to see what everyone else missed.

“It’s not grass,” Mad said.

Luck stared. “I mean, it looks pretty committed to being grass.”

“It’s artificial turf,” Keith explained.

I looked down again. Now that he’d said it, I could see it. It was super green and perfect.

Mad stood slowly. “It’s a door.”

The words moved through the storm with a strange finality. A door? In the ground. Hidden beneath fake grass and snow, in the middle of nowhere.

My skin prickled.

Oxi laughed once under his breath. “Of course. Why wouldn’t there be a secret apocalypse lawn-turf door?”

Luck nodded solemnly. “Honestly, this is on us for not expecting the murder-cat cult world to also include trapdoor landscaping.”