A.N.:

I wrote this a long time ago, back in 2007 when I was still a highschool student in love with cliché writing, had a weakness for typos, and quite a dark way of looking at the world. Suddenly possessed by an unexpected desire to look over my old Fanfictions I noticed that Fahrenheit 451 now had a section of its own. I thought I'd share this with anyone interested to read. A piece of advice to any boy or girl who feels the rush of adventure and excitement when she writes stories, don't let your adult life take that away. It has been a long time since I'd written anything, and now when I do, the words are not the same. I feel the imagination that has driven me to write these stories as a teenager have been massively diluted by university, bills, work, and other such things many of us can't escape when we finally grow up. For any person who feels the same way about writing that I once did, I hope you realize how precious of a gift it is that you have. Never let that beautiful feeling go.

All the best,
LeMoNsOuR

PartFour

The Chariot of Fire

Montag didn't have the heart to look forward towards the smog of dust settling over the ground; the place that held him captive under an illusion of happiness. He didn't have the heart to look on either side of him at the men he still couldn't trust. Every direction he looked would hit him with pain, confusion, and loss.

So he looked up.

So that's what stars look like.

The roar of a plane could be heard but its source unseen. Was it safe now to go back?

Was there really any point of going back?

Montag sucked in a breath of frozen air.

Faber.

The thought of him immediately brought on the faint memory of the smell of socks and laundry detergent. At the end the cowardly lion always got his courage. What use is courage to the dead?

Don't think that!he scolded himself.

Besides the tattered clothes on his back and a newly formed black eye, hope was all that Montag had. It was all he could depend on.

Stranger than strange, he couldn't find himself really missing anything from his old home, the place that he had grown up in for thirty years. No emotion, no loss. It was more of the feeling of when a rich uncle dies and leaves you a billion dollar inheritance. You don't care about the dead old geezer... you have what you've always wanted!

He began to recollect words that slowly came to him from Ecclesiastes. He never finished it. Montag had memorized a few pages but never had time to know the whole book. He didn't have the heart to tell them that.

Everyone was seated around a fire ignited by one of the last matches they had in stock. The discussion of books, philosophy, and individualism came up. Montag felt like an ignorant child sitting uncomfortable in a parlor watching patiently as the adults had their big-people's-talk.

"What do you really do here besides memorize books?" Montag said, plucking a blade of grass from the ground and brushing it against his callused palm.

"We discuss them, of course." Granger smiled. The grown-ups smiled at Montag's cute little question.

"Why?" Montag asked again.

A silence.

"Why not?" Granger said.

"That's not what I mean... I'm trying to ask, why would you escape a place of everything only to run into the woods where you have nothing?"

"We have books, Montag. We have thoughts now. To us, that is everything.We have freedom, and that is worth more than a comfortable bed to sleep in and something to eat every day."

"Is it, now?"

Montag didn't ask this question aloud.

"What do we do from here? " asked Alice in Wonderland. "There's no way we can go to the city now. It's hell back there! Where are we going to get supplies, to get food?"

There was a silence.

"We'll find a way," Granger said.

Then the words came. He didn't even feel them slither up his throat and seep out of his teeth.

"What if we find anothercity?"

There were murmurs of approval and cynical exchanged glances between what wold appear to the average eye, a sad group of scraggly hobos sitting around the fire. Yet, Granger looked Pale, and Alice In Wonderland looked as if she had a tick chewing at her left eye.

"No! We don't even know what's out there!" she stood up, looking like a toddler in a sudden tantrum. "We should go back to the city to gather what we can and try to find some survivors."

"Okay, first of all," Montag said calmly, coldly, "there is no real way anyone could have survived. It was a bomb.Number two; the radiation, the toxic air, and the debris will kill us faster than the starvation that may kill us if we try to find another city."

Alice shrank and sat back down.

Granger still stared lifelessly into the fire.

There was something he wasn't telling them. Montag seemed to be the only one to notice.

"What do you think about the whole thing?" Montag asked, still in his calm voice.

His eyes screened the air for a certain memory; a certain... thought.

"We are going back to the city."

Granger stood up and walked away.