Chapter 1: Awakening in Chaos
The roar of jet engines became the crash of waves. Sand filled his mouth, gritty and salt-bitter. Screaming pierced the air from every direction. Mac's eyes snapped open to chaos he remembered but shouldn't.
His skull felt split in two. Memories crashed against each other like waves—construction sites under blazing sun, stages he'd never performed on, medical procedures he'd never studied. The last clear memory was different, wrong: a heart attack at thirty-two, clutching his chest in a dingy apartment, gasping for air that wouldn't come. Then nothing. Then this.
Mac rolled onto his side, spitting sand. Bodies littered the beach around him. Some moved, groaning and calling for help. Others lay still as driftwood. The fuselage of what had been Flight 815 burned fifty yards away, black smoke billowing into a blue sky that seemed impossibly bright.
"Help!" A woman's voice, high with panic. "Someone help me!"
He tried to stand. His legs wobbled like a newborn colt's. The competing memories made his vision swim—he was Mac Kerby, twenty-eight, no family, no prospects, who'd died alone of a massive coronary. But he was also someone else, someone who knew how to tie nautical knots and perform emergency surgery and pick locks with a paperclip. Knowledge he'd never learned flooded his mind in fragments.
"Jack! Jack, where are you?"
That name hit him like a physical blow. Jack Shephard. Spinal surgeon. Control freak with daddy issues. Kate Austen, fugitive on the run. James "Sawyer" Ford, con man with a borrowed name. Charlie Pace, rock star junkie. Hurley Reyes, lottery winner cursed by numbers.
He knew them all. Impossible, but he knew their faces, their stories, their fates. Every detail felt real as his own memories, but twisted sideways, like watching a movie where he somehow knew the script.
Pain lanced through his skull when he tried to grasp how he knew these things. White-hot agony forced him to stop thinking, stop questioning. The knowledge was there, but reaching for it felt like grabbing molten metal.
Mac staggered upright. The beach stretched in both directions, littered with debris and human wreckage. People stumbled through the carnage, some helping, others just standing in shock. The sound of crying mixed with distant explosions from the fuselage.
His hands tingled. Not pain—something else. Energy flowed under his skin like warm water through pipes. When he looked down, his palms glowed with faint golden light for just a heartbeat before fading.
What the hell?
A man screamed thirty feet away. Mac's legs moved before his brain engaged, carrying him toward the sound. He found a passenger trapped under a piece of wing, blood pooling beneath him. A jagged strip of metal protruded from his side like an accusation.
Mac knelt beside him. The man was maybe forty, wedding ring on his finger, vacation clothes now torn and bloody. His eyes rolled back, showing whites.
"Hey, stay with me." Mac's hands moved to the wound. Knowledge flooded through him—pressure points, blood flow, trauma response. Things he'd never learned but somehow knew. "What's your name?"
"Gary," the man wheezed. "Gary Morrison. My wife... is she...?"
"Let's focus on you right now, Gary."
Mac pressed his palm against the man's abdomen, avoiding the metal shard. The golden glow returned, brighter this time, spreading from his hands into Gary's body. Warmth flowed through Mac's fingertips, and Gary's breathing steadied almost immediately. The bleeding slowed to a trickle.
The sensation was indescribable. Mac could feel Gary's pain as if it were his own—the tearing agony in his side, the dizzy weakness from blood loss, the panic clawing at his chest. But alongside the pain came something else: Gary's life force, his essence, flowing back toward stability under Mac's touch.
"That's... better." Gary's color improved. "How did you...?"
Mac jerked his hands away. Gary's blood covered his palms, but underneath, his skin still glowed with residual energy. The pain echoing through Mac's body faded slowly, leaving him hollow and exhausted.
"Just pressure points," Mac lied. "Learned it in the service."
Another lie. He'd never served anywhere except behind a cash register at a dead-end job. But somehow he knew exactly how to stabilize trauma victims, how to tie tourniquets, how to keep someone conscious through blood loss.
"Need some help here!"
Mac looked up to find a man with dark hair and intense eyes kneeling across from him. The face was familiar—achingly familiar—but it took a moment for the name to surface.
Jack Shephard.
The surgeon's hands moved with practiced efficiency, checking Gary's pulse, examining the wound. His eyes flicked to Mac's bloodstained palms and the noticeably slower bleeding.
"You did this?" Jack's voice carried surprise and something else. Suspicion.
"Pressure points," Mac repeated. "Combat medic training."
Jack's eyebrows rose. He pressed his own hands against Gary's wound, checking the seal Mac had created. His fingers came away cleaner than they should have. Much cleaner.
"This is good work. Where'd you serve?"
Mac's mouth went dry. He scrambled for details that didn't exist in his memory. "Afghanistan. Long time ago."
Jack studied him for a long moment. Around them, the chaos of the crash continued—people crying, calling for help, stumbling through debris. But Jack's attention was fixed on Mac with laser intensity.
"I'm Dr. Jack Shephard." He extended a blood-covered hand.
Mac shook it, trying to ignore the way Jack's eyes narrowed when their skin made contact. Could he feel the residual energy? The warmth?
"Mac Kerby."
"Well, Mac Kerby, I could use your help. There are a lot of wounded people here."
Before Mac could respond, another voice cut through the noise.
"Oh my God, is he okay?"
A woman approached, her brown hair tangled with sand and debris. Freckles scattered across her face like stars. Kate Austen, though she wouldn't give her real name for days yet. She looked younger than Mac expected, more vulnerable, but her eyes held the same wariness he remembered from fragments of borrowed memory.
"He'll be fine," Jack said, not taking his attention off Mac. "Your friend here has some medical training."
Kate's gaze settled on Mac, cataloging his face with the practiced eye of someone used to reading people quickly. Her expression was polite but guarded.
"That's lucky," she said. "We need all the help we can get."
Mac nodded, not trusting his voice. The fragments of future memory pressed against his skull—Kate running through jungle, Kate kissing Jack, Kate killing her stepfather in a kitchen that smelled of coffee and lies. Every detail felt real and immediate, but reaching for them sent lightning through his head.
"Mac?" Jack's voice seemed to come from far away. "You alright? You look pale."
He was staring. Mac forced himself to focus on the present, on Gary Morrison who needed help now, not on futures that might never come to pass.
"Fine. Just... it's a lot to take in."
Jack's expression softened slightly. "First crash?"
Mac almost laughed. First crash, first transmigration, first time waking up with powers ripped from someone else's life. But he just nodded.
"Mine too," Kate said quietly. Something in her voice made Mac look up. She was watching Jack now, and Mac caught a glimpse of the connection that would define so much of what came next.
More screams echoed from near the fuselage. Jack's head snapped toward the sound, his face shifting into crisis mode.
"We need to move him." Jack indicated Gary. "Get him away from the wreckage in case there's another explosion."
Mac started to lift Gary's shoulders, but Jack grabbed his wrist.
"Careful with that shrapnel. One wrong move and he bleeds out."
The touch sent a jolt through Mac's system. For just an instant, the golden glow flickered back to life under his skin. Jack's eyes widened, then narrowed. He'd definitely felt something.
They managed to move Gary to higher ground, away from the smoking debris. Other survivors had started gathering there—a mix of shocked faces, torn clothes, and shell-shocked expressions. Mac recognized some of them from his impossible memories, but they were just background characters in his vision, faces without names.
"How did you know to avoid the carotid when you applied pressure?" Jack asked suddenly.
Mac's blood chilled. He had no idea what that meant, but somehow his hands had moved with perfect precision around Gary's wound. Knowledge without understanding, skill without training.
"Lucky guess?"
Jack's expression made it clear he didn't believe in lucky guesses. Not when they involved medical procedures that could mean the difference between life and death.
Before Jack could press further, a new voice broke the tension.
"Dude, this is so messed up."
A large man with curly hair approached, his vacation shirt torn and stained with blood. Hurley Reyes, though Mac wouldn't know that name for hours yet. His face was round and kind, but his eyes held the same shock as everyone else.
"Is he gonna be okay?" Hurley asked, nodding toward Gary.
"He should be fine," Jack said, but his attention remained on Mac. "Thanks to some quick thinking."
Hurley looked at Mac with obvious gratitude. "Thank you, man. Really. It's good to know someone here knows what they're doing."
The words hit harder than they should have. Mac didn't know what he was doing. He was operating on instincts that belonged to someone else, using knowledge he'd never earned, wielding powers he didn't understand. The whole thing felt like fraud on a cosmic scale.
"We should set up a medical area," Jack said. "Somewhere central where people can find us."
Mac nodded, already seeing the logistics in his mind—clear lines of sight, access to fresh water, shelter from the elements. More knowledge he shouldn't have. Master Builder instincts humming under his skin like a second heartbeat.
"I could help with that," Mac said. "Setting up shelter, I mean. I'm... good with construction."
Kate tilted her head slightly. "Medical training and construction? Busy military career."
Her tone was light, but Mac caught the probing nature of the question. Kate Austen had survived this long by reading people, by spotting lies and inconsistencies. And Mac was full of both.
"Had a lot of time between deployments," he said. "Picked up some skills."
It wasn't exactly a lie. Someone had picked up those skills. Just not him.
The sun was setting, painting the sky in shades of orange and red. The beach looked like a battlefield—wreckage scattered everywhere, survivors huddled in small groups, the constant background noise of crying and calling for help. In the distance, the jungle pressed close to the sand, dark and full of unknown threats.
Mac's fragmented memories whispered warnings he couldn't quite grasp. There were things in that jungle. Dangerous things. A monster made of smoke and judgment. People who called themselves Others. A man named Ethan who would smile while he killed you.
Pain spiked through his skull again. Mac gripped his head, waiting for it to pass.
"You sure you're okay?" Hurley asked. "You keep looking like someone's hitting you with a hammer."
"Headache. Probably from the crash."
Kate moved closer, her voice dropping. "You should get some rest. We'll need everyone functional tomorrow."
There was something in the way she said it—not just kindness, but calculation. She was already thinking about survival, about who would be useful and who would be a liability. Mac filed that away as important information about Kate Austen's character.
"Good idea," Jack said, but he was still watching Mac with that clinical intensity. "We'll talk more tomorrow. About your medical background."
It wasn't a suggestion.
Mac nodded and stepped back from the group. He needed space to think, to process what was happening to him. The powers, the memories, the impossible knowledge of people and events he shouldn't know.
As he walked away, Mac caught fragments of conversation behind him.
"...seemed to know exactly what he was doing..."
"...never seen bleeding stop that fast without sutures..."
"...something weird about his hands..."
Mac found a spot up the beach, away from the main group but close enough to hear if anyone called for help. He sat on a piece of driftwood and stared at his palms in the fading light. They looked normal now—no glow, no energy, just skin and blood and calluses from a life he'd never lived.
But he could still feel it underneath. Power flowing through channels he didn't understand, waiting for the next time someone needed healing. And beyond that, other abilities stirring to life—the urge to build, to create shelter and safety from chaos. Knowledge of locks and traps and ways to hide in plain sight.
He was Mac Kerby, dead at thirty-two from a heart attack in a crappy apartment. But he was also someone else now, someone with impossible abilities and fragmentary knowledge of futures that might come to pass.
The question was: what did he do with it?
In the distance, the jungle whispered with sounds that didn't belong to any natural ecosystem. Mac's inherited instincts screamed danger, warned him that things moved in those shadows that defied explanation.
Tomorrow would bring new challenges, new opportunities to use his powers, new chances to slip up and reveal what he really was. For now, he just sat and watched the stars emerge overhead, trying to reconcile two lifetimes of memory in one confused brain.
His hands still tingled with residual energy. Tomorrow, he'd start building. Tomorrow, he'd begin the delicate balance of helping without revealing, of saving lives without losing himself.
Tomorrow, he'd need to be more careful.
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