The Remaining: Trust: A Novella by D. J. Molles

height with close-cropped hair and a mouthful of large, incredibly straight teeth. He had a relaxed manner, and he seemed perpetually curious.
    “Do you have any questions?” Dr. Cook had asked.
    Lee remembered testing his own thundering pulse—touching his fingers to his carotid artery. His skin was clammy and sweaty, his collar wet. “When do you guys tell me what this is about?”
    “Well, today you sat in a chair and received visual stimuli for a period of ninety minutes. Kind of like a virtual reality game. The drugs were to help your mind interpret the visual stimuli as reality.”
    Lee stared blankly, not quite sure what to ask from there. He had plenty of questions but really couldn’t categorize them or prioritize them.
    Dr. Cook smiled and leaned forward, clasping his hands. “We’re testing something I like to call mental flex .” Dr. Cook looked thoughtful, as though trying to come up with an apt description, though Lee got the impression that he had already given this speech dozens of times. “Imagine a dream where you are faced with a life-or-death struggle—a literal fight for your life. Now imagine that this dream fight is against something terrifying, something that you know cannot be real. Even as your logical forebrain is thinking, This can’t possibly be real , is your dream self still fighting? Or do you stop and wait for the dream to be over?”
    Dr. Cook leaned an elbow on his chair’s armrest. “We’ve found that in certain scenarios or situations, a sense of denial is unavoidable. You actually can’t really train it out of someone. It doesn’t matter how elite of a soldier, how much of a badass he is; certain things the brain simply refuses to believe. So when that happens, we’ve found that most people fall into one of two categories—the flexible or the inflexible. If a person is inflexible, he will mentally stop, almost like he is refusing to entertain the thought because it is so unbelievable.” Dr. Cook laughed a weird little chuckle. “I’m talking about top-tier operators here. I’ve seen it happen. Now, granted, the better trained they are, the harder it is to get them to that denial. But you keep pressing the boundaries of someone’s reality, and eventually he will reach it. And then most people pop. Like an overloaded circuit.”
    Here he stopped and held up a finger. “But a few—probably about a third—will keep fighting, even when their brain is in that state of denial. And if you’re still fighting then you are flexible . You have mental flex .”
    Lee swallowed, felt cold. “So do I have it?”
    Another big, toothy grin. “Oh, you’ve got it.”
    *  *  *
    Lee lay in his bed, still awake at 0200 hours on the morning of July 4.
    He had not eaten for the remainder of the evening, not having the appetite. His mind kept replaying his concerns in a dizzying cycle, like a short, annoying song set on repeat. What if this is it? I can’t believe it’s the end. It can’t possibly be the end. That’s bullshit.
    You’re overreacting. Frank will call. He’s never missed a call before. But what if this is really it?
    What if? What if?
    Lee tried to turn off his mind but couldn’t, and he failed to think of a reason that he needed to sleep. It wasn’t like he had big plans, despite it being Independence Day.
    That’s a first. Locked in The Hole on Independence Day. That’s fucking un-American , he thought. I swear to God, I am going to chew Frank the fuck out…I hope he’s okay. He’s gotta be okay. I am a contingency plan. Contingency plans are for contingencies. Contingencies don’t happen, at least not on this scale. Not on the scale that requires me to get involved.
    He recalled his commission for this job. He remembered thinking, at first, that it was total horseshit. But in the end you couldn’t beat the pay, and you couldn’t beat the benefits. The government built his entire house on three acres in the central North Carolina countryside. From