Iron Age of the Dead

Rome did not fall to the barbarians. It fell to the dead, and one soldier spent sixty years fighting back against the dark tide.Titus Africanus is twenty-two when he rides home to bury his father and finds the villa burning, the household slaughtered, and a plundered cairn where a strongbox used to be. Inside that box was the golem primus - the severed, undying head that his father carried down from Masada, sold to a lanista for arena gold, and hid for thirty years after a night of fires, riot, and slaughter. Now Visigoth raiders have taken it north, and the tracks of the newly risen lead south. Toward Rome.What follows is the secret history of an empire's collapse.Conscripted into a shadow cohort that officially does not exist, Titus is sworn to fight a plague the Empire will not name. Every town he saves is recorded as a wolf attack. Every man he loses is written down as fever. Beside him stand ten brothers - a ledger-keeping optio who counts every death, a Judean scribe who can read the letters on the golem's brow, three freed gladiators who learned to kill the dead on the sands, a slave-catcher hunting for the first thing he was ever proud of, and an outcast thief small enough to go under any door.They begin dying almost at once.Across six decades and a crumbling frontier, Titus will watch the truth outlive the lie, watch Rome's own arteries carry the curse it refuses to see, and be offered the one thing no soldier of the shadows has ever been offered: to matter. Openly. Under his own name. As the man who ends the barbarian question forever - with a legion of the dead.From the explosive novella pages of "Gladiators vs Zombies" comes a full-length novel of historical horror in the tradition of the great Roman military epics: a story of brotherhood, buried truth, and the terrible weight of inheritance, told with the blood-and-sand realism of the arena and the slow-burning dread of a world where the dead walk. For fans of Spartacus, The Last Centurion, Walking Dead, and all things Rome, this sword & sandal epic is for you.