A Graveyard of Trees

The wind had teeth that day. Hot, dry gusts whipped through jarrah and marri like the whole forest wanted to howl. Every time it shifted, the fire changed with it, ribbons of flame flaring sideways, leaping through the treetops in seconds. The smoke didn’t rise so much as roll, tumbling down gullies, thick and choking, so it was hard to tell where the front actually was.

We had been at it since dawn. First blacking-out around farm sheds, then laying hose through a stand of pines the farmer swore he’d cleared only last week. Now the fire had jumped the track again, racing through the understory like it was built from petrol.

“Copy, Sector Bravo—we’ve got crowning in the canopy!” crackled the radio.

I tugged the nozzle left, sweeping across a run of burning grass, but the wind carried embers straight over me. The truck’s pump thumped, steady for now, though I could hear the strain. Sweat ran down under my mask and my gloves were slick. Someone shouted behind me—couldn’t tell who, the sound was swallowed by the roar of the fire.

“Pull back! Back to the truck!”

That I heard.

I turned and saw the sky had gone from gold to a dirty black. Out in the distance, a column twisted, a fire-whirled across a ridge, flinging sparks like fireworks as ash fell like snow.

I reeled in the hose, boots heavy in the mud and my lungs burned in my chest. Another blast of wind slammed the flames down a slope toward us. The fire didn’t move like fire anymore. It ran.

The truck was just ahead—a red Iveco, parked broadside along the firebreak. Metal shimmered with heat haze as two of the crew clambered off the tray, dropping hoses and swearing through their respirators.

The radio barked again, distorted: “… overrun protocol—” then dissolved into static.

Overrun.

That word cut through everything else.

I stumbled the last few metres, slammed the hose to the ground, and yanked open the cab door. The other three followed. Kyle rasping, Harry coughing, James silent as stone. The air reeked of melted plastic and smoke. I dived onto the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut.

The fire was on us.

Flames slapped the glass, orange light flooded the cab. I heard the windows ping as the heat stressed them, it was built for this. That’s what I had to tell myself, I wouldn’t have been able to hold it together otherwise. The whole truck shuddered, groaning as if it wanted to melt into the dirt.

The four of us fucked around in the cab. Checked our gear, pulled the heat shields down over the windows, strapped them in place. One by one we clipped them across the windows, and when the last one snapped into place, the fire disappeared. I grabbed the survival kit from behind the seat. My gloves fumbled with the Velcro. Out came the silver fire blankets, heat-proof, meant to buy minutes when minutes were all you had. We covered ourselves with them, just to be sure.

The noise was the worst of it. Fire didn’t just roar, it shrieked—layers of sound folding over each other until it was impossible to tell which was wind, which was timber, which was the truck itself breaking apart.

The cab shook with each blast. The metal roof pinged like it was being hammered from above. We sat hunched, shoulder to shoulder, fire blankets pulled tight anround our necks, the feeling of them both reassuring and suffocating. Helmets pressed together, visors fogging, every breath loud in the mask.

The rubber in the wheel wells started to go, a slow blistering pop-pop-pop as the tyres began to melt and sag. The whole truck dipped slightly to one side as the bead slipped off the rim.

You could hear the paint peeling off the body with a dry crackle, imagined it curling like paper held too close to a flame, flakes hissing against the windscreen before the shield dulls the sound.

None of us spoke. Talking would’ve meant admitting how bad it was.

Something exploded outside—maybe a tree, maybe a fuel drum. The concussion rattled the glass so hard I thought it would shatter, the sound cut through the roar like a gunshot.

I clenched the blanket tighter. It stuck to my gloves, already damp with sweat. Every muscle screamed to move, to run, but there was nowhere to go. Training said stay sealed. Wait it out.

Trust the truck.

It groaned again. The steel tray pinged as it warped, panels expanding with the heat. Bolts shrieked against their holes. For a moment I thought the whole thing might buckle in on itself.

Kyle coughed in the back seat. Even through the mask it sounded raw, wet. Harry muttered something I couldn’t hear. My own heartbeat drowned it all out—fast, hammering, louder than the fire for a second before the roar came surging back.

Time stretched and seconds felt like hours. The fire pressed against the cab, testing every seam.

A branch landed on the roof with a solid thump, none of us flinched. The weight stayed there, shifting as if settling in.

The air inside grew heavier, hotter, as if the fire was leaching through the metal inch by inch. The truck and the blankets were our only shield, and still my knees were hot near the door.

I closed my eyes. It made no difference. The roar was still there, the heat still clawing at us, the smell of rubber and paint and cooked soil flooded every breath.

We were in the middle of it now. No front, no back, no safe side. Just the fire, chewing at the world from all directions, and a truck barely big enough to keep us alive.

The air turned heavy, thick enough it felt like trying to breathe underwater. Sweat ran down my back in sheets, trapped by the overalls, pooling in my boots. Every exhale fogged my visor, every inhale hotter, the taste of melted rubber and plastic grew stronger.

The truck lurched again as another tyre sloughed off its rim. A low, dragging scrape followed—metal on dirt, rim biting into softened ground. For a heartbeat I imagined the whole rig sinking, swallowed by earth turned to slag.

Bolts snapped in the tray. One, then another. Each went with a sharp metallic crack that cut through the roar. The gear strapped down behind us banged and shifted, loose tools tumbling, cylinders clanging together like a drumline.

We all knew the rules: stay put, trust the blankets, wait for the oxygen to hold. But the fire was everywhere, pounding at the cab from every angle, rattling glass in their frames, hammering the roof until it flexed.

Something outside screamed. Not a person—timber splitting, a tree venting steam and bursting apart. The blast made my teeth clack together.

I pressed the back of my head into the seat and shut my eyes, my helmet uncomfortable. Still, the light burned through the gaps of the heat shield: an angry, flickering reddish orange that seemed to pulse with sound.

Minutes passed, or maybe seconds. Hard to tell. My watch had fogged over, useless.

Then, slowly, the roar began to change. It didn’t stop—it shifted. What had been a full-throated howl thinned to a guttural moan, like the fire was moving on, dragging itself down the slope, searching for more to eat.

The cab stayed hot and oppressive, but the hammering lessened. The rattles softened.

One by one, we risked lifting the edges of the heat shields, just enough to see outside

The world still boiled, a dull red glow through the seams, branches falling, embers hissing, but the worst had passed.

The truck ticked in the silence that followed, metal settling back into itself. The tyres were gone, the paint half-bubbled off, but it was still sealed, still standing. So were we.

For the first time since slamming the door, I believed we might walk out of it alive.

We waited another few minutes, long enough that the roar dulled into background noise, long enough for the cab to cool from a furnace to sauna. Then Harry unlatched his mask, slow, cautious, testing the air.

“Smoke,” he rasped, voice raw, “but it’ll do.”

One by one, we rolled the shields up. They clung to us with sweat, stiff and heavy. My gloves left damp prints on the dash.

The windows were black. Not tinted—coated, the rear passenger window lined with hairline cracks… and soot and ash baked into the others. I pushed my door open an inch and the hinge squealed, warped but holding. A gust of air forced its way in, sharp with char and a chemical burn.

We sat a moment longer, listening. Not silence exactly, just the absence of the roar. The fire was still there, but it had moved on, its hunger carrying it further down the valley. What remained was a crackle of settling timbers, the odd snap of a branch, a hiss where something still smouldered.

When we climbed out, the heat hit like an oven door opening. The ground was black glass. The tyres had collapsed entirely, rims sunk in the blistered earth. The tray was warped, corners twisted, paint stripped in patches to bare, scarred steel.

Kyle swore softly. Harry just shook his head. James and I stood in silence.

The sky was still wrong, brown-grey, smeared with ash—but above it, a faint strip of blue peeked through, fragile as wet tissue. Birds wheeled high, ragged survivors drifting on the smoke.

All around us, the forest was gone. Trees stood like skeletons, bark peeled, branches like thin fingers clawing at the haze. What had been green that morning was reduced to black, a hollowed-out bushland, silent and waiting.

We checked gear by habit. Radios—dead. Hydration packs—half empty. Masks—filthy but intact. The truck was written off, but upright. That meant we were too.

I crouched, pressed my glove into the soil. It came up grey-black, flakes falling away. Still warm, as though the fire had only stepped aside for a breath before it returns.

We just stood there, a long moment and none of us spoke. The fire had passed, but it left us stranded in a world remade, stripped bare, fragile as cracked porcelain.

The strangest thing wasn’t the ruin, or the silence, or even the stink of the molten rubber. It was that we were alive in the middle of a valley of death. Four of us in a graveyard of trees, listening to a wind that, at last, carried no teeth.