The first bomb struck.
“Mildred!”
Perhaps the television station went first into oblivion.
Montag saw the screen go dark in Mildred’s face, and heard her screaming, because in the next millionth part of time left, she would see her own face reflected there, hungry and alone, in a mirror instead of a crystal ball, and it would be such a wildly empty face that she would at last recognize it, and stare at the ceiling almost with welcome as it and the entire structure of the hotel blasted down upon her, carrying her with a million pounds of brick, metal and people down into the cellar, there to dispose of them in its unreasonable way.
“I remember now,” thought Montag, “where we first met. It was in Chicago. Yes, now I remember.”
Montag found himself on his face. The concussion had knocked the air across the river, turned the men down like dominoes in a line, blown out the fire like a last candle, and caused the trees to mourn with a great voice of wind passing away south.
Montag lay with his face toward the city. Now it, instead of the bombs, was in the air. They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of dust and sparkles of torn metal into a city not unlike a reversed avalanche, formed of flame and steel and stone, a door where a window ought to be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell.
The sound of its death came after.
AND MONTAG LYING THERE, his eyes shut, gasping and crying out, suddenly thought, “Now I remember another thing. Now I remember the Book of Job.” He said it over to himself, lying tight to the earth; he said the words of it many times and they were perfect without trying. “Now I remember the Book of Job. Now I do remember …”
“There,” said a voice, Granger’s voice.
The men lay like gasping fish on the grass.
They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a familiar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen. Their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept them, shaking their hair, tearing at their lips, making their noses bleed.
Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an absorption that the city was effortlessly forgotten.
The wind died.
The city was flat, as if one had taken a heaping tablespoon of flour and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.
The men said nothing. They lay a while like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day’s obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing faster, then slower, then with the slowness of normality.
Montag sat up. He did not move any farther, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was touching the black horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet.
And across the world, thought Montag, the cities of the other nations are dead, too, almost in the same instant.
Silently, the leader of the small group, Granger, arose, felt of his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blown-out fire and bent over it. Montag watched.
Striking a match, Granger touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, and shoved together bits of straw and dry wood, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it by its glow, the fire licked up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.
THERE WAS NO SOUND except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was no more than this:
“How many strips?”
“Two each.”
“Good enough.”
The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, thought Montag, a thing man had done over and over again, and Montag felt at ease among them, as if during the long night the walls of a great prison had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, with no schedule, and with no nagging human insistence.
“Here,” said Granger, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan. They each held out the scratched tin plates that had been passed around.
Then, without looking up, breaking more eggs into the pan for himself, Granger slowly and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, and for making the food also, began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, round about.
WHEN IT WAS MONTAG’S TURN, he spoke too:
“To everything there is a season,
And a time to every purpose under the heaven…
A time to be born, and a time to die…
A time to kill, and a time to heal …”
ORKS MOVED IN THE PINK LIGHT. Now each of the men remembered a separate and different thing, a bit of poetry, a line from a play, an old song. And they spoke these little bits and pieces in the early morning air:
“Man that is born of a woman
Is of few days and full of trouble …”
A WIND BLEW IN THE TREES.
“To be or not to be, that is the question …”
THE SUN WAS FULLY UP.
“Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”
Montag felt fine.
The End
