Red, blue, yellow fire danced along the creature’s body, flickering out like an aura of flames as the man-beast smiled evilly.   Stepping through the hole it had burnt into the wall, the infernal beast began slowly advancing toward its quarry.

“No!   No, don’t!” pleaded Stan as the grinning creature stepped up to wrap its long arms around Stan to crush him in a powerful bear hug.   A bear hug, which would have killed Stan, if only the flames had not killed him first.

The infernal beast held Stan in its embrace of death until he had burnt to a black husk, which crumbled and fell to the floor.   Then turning the creature walked back across to the panelled wall and squeezed out through its own outline burnt clean through the wall of the house.

*      *      *

It was late February 1983 and Victoria and South Australia had recently been scorched by the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which killed seventy-two people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of prime forestland.   Although the worst of the fires were over by the twenty-fourth of February, a few fires still burnt around the outskirts of Daley and Glen Hartwell, in the southeastern Victorian countryside.

It was everything that Donald Esk, the recently appointed chief of the Greater Daley Fire Department, could do to prevent the fires from reaching right into the heart of the townships themselves.

“How the Hell am I supposed to combat a major bushfire disaster, with only three fully trained fire-fighters and a dozen or so unpaid volunteers?” grumbled Esk.   He was taking a quick break only a few hundred metres from the towering wall of flames, which threatened to completely raze the foliage atop Mount Abergowrie on the northern outskirts of Glen Hartwell.

“They managed to put out the fires at Macedon and Cockatoo with virtually no paid fire-fighters at all, only volunteers,” replied Sergeant Danny Ross.   A tall, powerfully built, barrel-chested man, Ross was known affectionately as “Bear” by his close friends and colleagues in the Glen Hartwell Police Force.

“Yes, but with the loss of over thirty lives,” pointed out Esk, a tall, thin yet muscular man, who usually looked at least ten years younger than his age of forty-five.   But after the last fortnight of battling bushfires he now looked and felt closer to sixty.   “So far I’ve been lucky, with only two major burn victims, and no fatalities.   But sooner or later my luck will run out…Unless somehow we manage to put out these last three fires quickly.”