The Fireman: A Novel

FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC

You didn’t go close to the dead guy, did you?”

“No.” Harper did not bother to stick her nose in the glass and inhale the French bouquet as Jakob had taught her, when she was twenty-three and freshly laid and more drunk on him than she would ever be on wine. She polished off her sauvignon blanc in two swallows

From where she stood, she had a direct view of the blacktop, a few hundred feet of tarmac marked up with the occasional hopscotch grid. Beyond that was an acre of mulch, with an elaborate play set planted in it: swings, slides, a climbing wall, and a row of steel pipes the kids could bang on to make musical gongs (privately Harper referred to these last as the Xylophone of the Damned