Chapter 26: The Black Rock Expedition
Six of them trekked through the jungle toward the Black Rock's impossible location: Jack with his medical authority, Kate with her survival instincts, Locke with his mystical certainty, Hurley with his nervous optimism, and Dr. Leslie Arzt with his increasingly annoying lecture about proper explosive handling techniques.
And Mac, whose enhanced senses screamed warnings about the wrongness they were approaching.
"The key to handling unstable dynamite," Arzt pontificated as they pushed through undergrowth, "is understanding the crystallization process of nitroglycerin. Temperature fluctuations cause molecular breakdown that makes the compound exponentially more sensitive to shock."
Mac tuned out the science teacher's monologue, his attention focused on readings that defied explanation. His construction sense was detecting something ahead that shouldn't exist—a massive structure where no structure should be, preserved in ways that violated every principle of decay and erosion he understood.
Then they broke through the jungle canopy and Mac's breath caught in his throat.
The Black Rock sat on a mountainside miles from any ocean, its three-masted bulk impossibly intact despite being displaced from its natural element. The slave ship loomed above them like a monument to maritime impossibility, its wooden hull showing signs of violent impact but no evidence of the rot that should have consumed it decades ago.
Mac's construction sense went into overdrive, analyzing the vessel with Phase Two intensity that provided more information than his conscious mind could process. Mid-1800s construction, built for human cargo, designed to survive Atlantic crossings but never intended for jungle preservation.
The ship had been thrown here with massive force—tsunami-level wave or the island itself moving through space and time. But the impact that should have shattered every timber had somehow left the vessel structurally sound, as if something had protected it during its impossible journey.
"This was thrown here," Mac said, his voice carrying professional certainty. "The impact should have turned it into kindling. Something preserved it deliberately."
Locke's smile carried religious satisfaction. "The Island wanted it saved. For us. For this moment."
Mac hated when Locke's mystical nonsense almost made logical sense, but the evidence was undeniable. The Black Rock's preservation violated natural law in service of some unknowable purpose.
They climbed aboard through gaps torn in the hull, Arzt continuing his lecture on explosive safety while examining sticks of dynamite that had somehow survived exposure to tropical humidity for over a century.
"Remarkable preservation," Arzt mused, holding a stick up to the light. "The nitroglycerin should have sweated out years ago, but these seem stable. As stable as dynamite ever gets, anyway."
Mac examined the ship's construction while the others gathered explosives, his historical analysis abilities providing insights that chilled him to the bone. This vessel had carried human cargo in chains, had participated in the slave trade that built empires on suffering and death.
And now it would provide the tools to open something that might release suffering of an entirely different magnitude.
"Careful with that," Arzt warned as Hurley reached for a stick of dynamite. "Even stable dynamite is incredibly sensitive to—"
The explosion vaporized Dr. Arzt mid-sentence, turning him into a crimson mist that splattered across everyone in the immediate vicinity. Blood and viscera painted the ship's interior like some grotesque artwork, while the thunder of the blast echoed through the jungle.
Hurley vomited over the side of the ship. Kate screamed, her hands covered in what had been a living person seconds before. Jack staggered backward, his medical training providing no framework for processing instantaneous human vaporization.
Mac stood frozen in the aftermath, Arzt's blood dripping from his clothes while guilt burned through his chest like acid. He could have warned them about the dynamite's instability, could have used his enhanced senses to detect which sticks were too dangerous to handle.
But he'd found Arzt annoying, had been irritated by the man's condescending lectures, and had let that petty emotion override his protective instincts. Another death that his powers might have prevented, if only he'd cared enough to speak up.
The guilt tasted like copper and smoke, adding another weight to the collection of failures that haunted his borrowed existence.
"Nobody else touches anything," Mac commanded, his voice cutting through the shocked silence. "I can sense structural instability. It's what I do."
Jack started to protest, but Mac was already moving with Phase Two precision, his hands reading each stick's crystallization patterns through enhanced diagnostic touch. Some were stable enough for transport. Others would explode if someone looked at them wrong.
He selected carefully, abandoning more dynamite than he kept, while Locke tried to argue for taking additional explosives.
"You want to blow yourself up chasing destiny, that's your choice," Mac said, physically blocking Locke from the dangerous sticks. "But you're not taking others with you."
They carried minimal dynamite back toward camp, every step a nightmare of potential catastrophe. Mac's hands glowed faintly as he used his healing sense to monitor the explosives' stability—a new application of his abilities that nobody commented on because they were too terrified to notice supernatural manifestations.
The trek back felt like walking through a minefield while carrying lit matches, each footfall potentially triggering disaster that would scatter them across the jungle in pieces too small for burial.
Mac's hands wouldn't stop shaking, and Kate stayed close enough to steady him when exhaustion from constant vigilance threatened to overwhelm his enhanced senses.
"I'm becoming the person who has to make impossible decisions with incomplete information," Mac realized as they approached camp. "Arzt died because I let personal irritation override my protective instincts. How many more people will die because I hesitate at crucial moments? How many deaths will I carry because my powers came with responsibilities I never wanted and knowledge I can't fully access?"
They returned to camp at dusk, carrying enough dynamite to open the hatch and probably kill them all if mishandled. Mac's construction sense continued reading the explosives' molecular instability, his consciousness split between the immediate danger of transport and the larger catastrophe they were preparing to unleash.
Tomorrow they would use Rousseau's dynamite to force open a door that had been sealed for very good reasons. Mac had done everything in his power to minimize the risks, but he knew with horrible certainty that tomorrow everything would change.
The only question was whether any of them would survive the revelation they were so desperately pursuing.
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