Fahrenheit 451

After Mildred and her friends report him, Montag is ordered by Fire Captain Beatty to burn down his own house, using a flamethrower rather than the usual mechanized "salamander." Mildred, devastated at losing her television "family" more than at losing Montag, walks out without acknowledging him and leaves by taxi. Montag destroys the house room by room, but Beatty discovers the earpiece radio linking him to the exiled ex-professor Faber and threatens to track Faber down. Montag turns the flamethrower on Beatty and burns him alive. The Mechanical Hound then attacks and injects anesthetic into Montag's leg before he manages to destroy it with the flamethrower.

Wounded, Montag flees toward Faber's home, narrowly escaping being run down by a car of joyriding teens. Faber tells him to head for the countryside to find a community of exiled book-lovers and plans to leave the city himself by bus. A second Mechanical Hound is dispatched to hunt Montag, with the chase broadcast live on television for public entertainment. Montag washes off his scent, changes clothes, and escapes by wading into a river and floating downstream, evading the manhunt.

Downriver, Montag finds the group of drifters and exiles, all former intellectuals who have memorized entire books in anticipation of a societal collapse, planning to help rebuild culture when the time comes. Their leader, Granger, welcomes him, and Montag discovers he has retained fragments of the Book of Ecclesiastes from memory. That same night, as the group talks, bombers appear overhead and the city is obliterated by nuclear war, which begins and ends within the same night. Faber, who was likely already on his bus out of the city, is not confirmed dead, but everyone left in the city — implicitly including Mildred — is killed in the bombing. Montag and the exiles survive the blast's shockwave, though injured and shaken.

In the aftermath, Granger reflects on the myth of the phoenix, comparing humanity's cycle of self-destruction and rebirth to the survivors' situation. Montag recalls a fragment from the Book of Revelation about healing. The novel ends with Montag and the group of exiles turning back toward the ruined city, intending to return and help rebuild society and restore the knowledge contained in the books they have preserved in memory.