The Tyrant's Tomb

Just hearing his name made my gut contort. Why, oh, why couldn’t I be a
unicorn?
We ran with our Swiss Army herd up the narrow, winding streets. The
battle was mostly pockets of house-to-house combat. Families had
barricaded their homes. Shops were boarded up. Archers lurked in upperstory
windows on the lookout for zombies. Roving bands of eurynomoi
attacked any living thing they could find.
As horrible as the scene was, something about it seemed oddly subdued.
Yes, Tarquin had flooded the city with undead. Every sewer grate and
manhole cover was open. But he wasn’t attacking in force, sweeping
systematically through the city to take control. Instead, small groups of
undead were popping up everywhere at once, forcing the Romans to
scramble and defend the citizenry. It felt less like an invasion and more like a
diversion, as if Tarquin himself were after something specific and didn’t
want to be bothered.
Something specific…like a set of Sibylline Books he’d paid good money
for back in 530 BCE.
My heart pumped more cold lead. “The bookstore. Meg, the bookstore!”
She frowned, perhaps wondering why I wanted to shop for books at a
time like this. Then realization dawned in her eyes. “Oh.”
She picked up speed, running so fast the unicorns had to break into a trot.
How I managed to keep up, I don’t know. I suppose, at that point, my body
was so far beyond help it just said, Run to death? Yeah, okay. Whatever.
The fighting intensified as we climbed the hill. We passed part of the
Fourth Cohort battling a dozen slavering ghouls outside a sidewalk café.
From the windows above, small children and their parents were tossing
things at the eurynomoi—rocks, pots, pans, bottles—while the legionnaires
jabbed their spears over the tops of their locked shields.
A few blocks farther on, we found Terminus, his World War I greatcoat
peppered with shrapnel holes, his nose broken clean off his marble face.
Crouching behind his pedestal was a little girl—his helper, Julia, I presumed
—clutching a steak knife.
Terminus turned on us with such fury I feared he would zap us into
stacks of customs declaration forms.
“Oh, it’s you,” he grumbled. “My borders have failed. I hope you’ve
brought help.”