In the award-winning, NY Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling book 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 guy referred to as the Fireman.

The fireman is coming. Stay great.

No one has learned exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying brand-new plague is spreading like wildfire in the united states, stunning about The Fireman: A Book cities one at a time: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors contact it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, an extremely contagious, dangerous spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and yellow metal marks across their bodies-before causing them to burst into flames. Hundreds of thousands are infected; blazes erupt all over the place. There is absolutely no antidote. Nobody is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated a huge selection of infected sufferers before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s found out the telltale gold-flecked marks on her epidermis. When the outbreak 1st started, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they might take matters into their personal hands if they became contaminated. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live-at least before fetus she is carrying involves term. At a healthcare facility, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy infants and believes hers will be fine as well . if she can live longer enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him ill, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New Britain 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 bring the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she worries: a secret and convincing stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a filthy yellow fireplace fighter’s jacket, holding a connected iron pub, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Referred to as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman suffering from Dragonscale who has learned to regulate the fireplace within himself, utilizing it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . so that as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world can burn out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life-and that of her unborn child-goes up in smoke cigarettes.