What becomes of the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451?

After Montag burns Captain Beatty to the ground near the end of the story, he makes a run for it and the authorities release the Mechanical Hound to find him. Montag goes to his Faber's house where he changes and gets a suitcase of Faber's clothes to throw the Hound off his scent. The Hound hunts Montag down with television and police helicopters on his tail. The whole city is watching the chase on TV. Montag heads for the river and completes the following tasks:

"He waded in and stripped in darkness to the skin, splashing his body, arms, legs, and head with raw liquor; drank it and snuffed some up his nose. Then he dressed in Faber's old clothes and shoes. He tossed his own clothing into the river and watched it swept away" (139).

By Montag changing clothes, bathing in liquor, and floating down the river, he throws the Mechanical Hound off his scent. It isn't until he meets up with Granger and his gang that Montag gets the rest of what happened to the Mechanical Hound. Apparently, Granger and his group watched the Hound on TV turn and run the other way when Montag tricked it at the river. The chase was still going on when Montag meets them, so they let him watch it unfold.

The TV crews claim that the chase heads north of the city, but of course they're lying. The government can't let people know that the Mechanical Hound was thrown off the scent with no real target to hunt, so they conjure up a new drama. Granger speculates the following:

"You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it. They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! . . . So they're sniffing for a scapegoat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!" (148).

The false drama comes to an end with the authorities finding another person in the city to have killed by the Hound instead of the real Montag. The Hound engages its deadly needle filled with a lethal substance and the man dies as the TV crew claims that Montag has been killed. In the very end, though, the Mechanical Hound gets obliterated with the rest of the city when an atomic bomb hits.