Butterflies in Winter

::Chapter 14:: Betray

When the group reached the headquarters, what greeted them was something that sent a shiver down every person present's spine.

Kit didn't want to believe it.

Every part of him seemed to ache with the terror of this news, the fear that it would bring, the consequences it meant for them. All of them.

He fell to his knees, the weight of the news was crippling him. Every inch of him was numb with the realisation. The truth of what had happened. Pain should have filled him, yet he couldn't feel a thing with the shock.

It didn't feel possible.

It couldn't be possible.

The shield had been taken down, destroyed and poisoned. After all that they'd heard from the strangers, they had begun to expect something similar to this. Yet, this wasn't what had hurt them the worst.

One of their own had taken it down.

This was a betrayal, and it was from within.

The aftermath of the meltdown had given them much and left them with little. One of the few things that helped them to survive had been the ability to put up a shield, to guard the outside world from the island and the island from the outside world.

Bellow the main base, was one of the few houses left standing. Where the few who survived had hidden during the meltdown. It was very basic and broken, but it was the place of power for the survivors and held great importance.

Connected to what remained of the fuel which had been running the power plants for years, it had kept anything from getting out.

Not for much longer.

Littering the ground was the remnants of the fuel, thrown in water and then dropped on the floor. Ruining it.

God only knows how long it's been like this, Kit thought with a whimper. As he straightened up from where he had been examining the state of the ground. He felt like he was going to be sick but he kept himself as strong as he could. In spite of the temptation to crawl into a corner and die.

Depending on how long it had been like this, no one could guess how many of the island's inhabitants had gotten out. It terrified every member as to how many of their enemy could have left in the time it had taken to find out.

Everyone else was in a similar state, even the strangers seemed to understand the pain and fear that was going through them. Whilst they might not have understood the pain the young people were feeling, even they were not so stupid as to not understand what had gone on here.

It seemed like everything was mounting up, the pain, the loss and the fear which had been building up over the last couple of days was now on the verge of bursting from him. Kit lowered his head, biting back the howl which rose to his chest.

But now was not the time for mourning. For if they didn't act fast, their friends would have died in vain. Every man and woman who had ever fallen in this awful place would have laid down their lives for nothing.

Kit would lie down his own life in order to make sure those who had fallen had not lost their lives in vain. He tried to pull himself together, to string together a line of coherent words but someone had beaten him to it.

"Now would be the perfect time to tell us that you've kept record of the monsters on this island," the voice was hopeful. Yet the tone of it seemed to indicate that even the speaker didn't believe the answer would be one they enjoyed.

"Can you keep an accurate count of every ant in England?" offered Kit in response, looking up with a frown. It was sharper than he had meant for it to sound, but it was true. The monsters had been impossible to count, they couldn't have kept count if they tried. It wasn't as though they could track them.

"I don't know about the ants here, but the ants in England are a heck of a lot less dangerous then the monsters on this island. At least from what we've seen of them," came a sharp retort from the man.

The next words carried a tone of defeat which perfectly illustrated the dark moment. "So your telling me you have no idea how many have escaped?"

He couldn't find the words, he couldn't bring himself to even try to find them. "None whatsoever," it was Vic who spoke. Apparently among the first to gather his thoughts enough to speak properly.

It wasn't necessary for them to speak for Kit to guess what they were thinking. From the looks that they were receiving, it didn't taken an idiot to know.

Before they could speak, Kit said in a low, angry tone. "We thought we were alone, we never expected to see any more faces outside of the ones who survived." The growl echoed from the back of his throat, and it was joined by a number of the others.

As ridiculous as it probably sounded to an outsider, they were protective over their work. It was something which they had dedicated a large part of their lives towards. None of them were going to take the idea that they hadn't tried their best lying down.

"Most of us believed that our last days would be spent here, we didn't think something like this was possible." It was Jessica this time who spoke, her voice more gentle than the ones before her.

"Far too many of us did have our last days on the island," added Max with a tone full of spite. "And it's not as though we had the resources to keep note, where exactly did you expect us to get paper or ink from?" He retorted, his eyes sharpening. Making it apparent that it was the eagle side of him who was very much in time at this point in time.

No one spoke for a moment, the pain and fear and anger between the two groups could have been cut with a knife.

Part of Kit was currently wanting to use that same knife to cut one of the people before them. If they continued to insinuate that this was the fault of the people who had spent the last five years trying to save them.

"So what do we do?" Romany spoke this time, her arms crossed. She chose to stand on neither side, but acted more like Switzerland in the middle. "If the monsters have truly left the island, what are we going to do about it?"

"We return to the mainland," the leader spoke definitively, Kit just stared at the man in silence taken aback by the words.

It meant that they were going home.

Author's Note

Hi Guys,

Sorry it took so long to get these chapters out, I've had a really long week and it took a bit longer than usual. It will be back to the normal update day next week. I hope you enjoyed this new batch of chapters, and I'd love to knw what you thought about them in the comments below.

I hope you have a lovely day,

Madelynn