From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2
and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic
of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes
and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one
powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying
new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking
cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco
Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly
contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and
gold marks across their bodies--before causing them to burst into
flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no
antidote. No one is safe.
Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary
Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital
burned to the ground. Now she's discovered the telltale gold-flecked
marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband,
Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if
they became infected. To Jakob's dismay, Harper wants to live--at least
until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she
witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes
hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the
child.
Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes
unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England
community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless
Cremation Squads--armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and
woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper
isn't as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she
briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter's
jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity
and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire,
a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire
within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as
a weapon to avenge the wronged.
In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control,
Harper must learn the Fireman's secrets before her life--and that of her
unborn child--goes up in smoke.
