From the award-winning, bestselling author of "NOS4A2" 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. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country. There is no antidote. No one is safe. A mysterious and compelling stranger in a dirty yellow fire fighter's jacket straddles the abyss between insanity and death. He strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within him, 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 Grayson must learn the Fireman's secrets before her life - and that of her unborn child - goes up in smoke.

When a bizarre virulent plague breaks out in the world's major cities, causing victims to spontaneously combust, a dedicated nurse resolves to survive until her baby is born and receives protection from a mysterious infected man who uses his fire symptoms to help others.

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 is 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 bel