Fireman

<p>From the award-winning <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author of <em>NOS4A2</em> and <em>Heart-Shaped Box</em> 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.</p><p><em>The fireman is coming. Stay cool.</em></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>