Shadows Unmasked: The Frost Team's Last Stand

It was a cold night in Norway, and my team and I were lucky to find a hotel before the sun went down. The hotel owner told us that the roads can get dangerous when it snows, and with our trucks full of guns and ammo, we couldn't afford to break down. We checked into our rooms, dropped off our weapons, changed into civilian clothes and then headed to the lobby for dinner. We sat down at a round table near the fire place to eat, sipping on mulled wine. It was very pleasant until one of my soldiers got up from his chair and walked over to me.

"Sigrid," he said. "There's something wrong with this hotel." I could smell the stench of alcohol on his breath.

"What do you mean?" I asked him. He was looking around the room restlessly. His eyes darted from the corner of the ceiling to the crack between two floorboards.

"There's a room upstairs," he said. "I heard something in there when I came up earlier. These old wooden stairs are creaking so loud that it's impossible for someone not to hear them."

"Is there anything else?" I asked him. "A smell or...?" He nodded.

"Yeah, there's this smell," he said. "It's not just alcohol either. It's weird...like chemicals...and..." he trailed off as he turned around again and looked at a middle-aged woman as she chatted away on her cell phone while entering the lobby. Her voluminous hair was dyed pink, but her face was wrinkled in age and it was hard to tell how attractive she once was back in her day. She wore thick glasses that magnified her eyes like a cartoon character, and a large coat that hid most of her figure except for her wide hips and large breasts that jiggled slightly with every step she took across the hardwood flooring of the lobby towards the stairs by where my soldier stood staring at her nervously as if he was waiting for an attack from behind.

"I think I know what it is," my soldier said after a moment where he stared at her in silence. "That lady just now...she's drunk out of her mind."

Sigrid eyed him quizzically as she sat back in her chair with another sip from her glass of wine and let go of a long deep sigh when she realized that nothing was going to happen this evening anyway as people went about their business without paying much attention to each other or anything around them except their own gadgets and devices they seemed glued to while they walked through town looking for places to sleep or eat or drink or talk on their phones like zombies who had been programmed only with instinctual thoughts by some artificial intelligence system who had no idea what they were doing wandering aimlessly through life because they had no purpose, no dreams, no beliefs or even desires other than sitting down staring at screens all day long without even blinking their eyes unless they were interrupted by some notification on their devices which they would frantically respond to sometimes causing them to bump into someone walking with them or spilling their drinks or food on themselves or others because they were too busy answering calls from people who hadn't called them in years, texts from people who didn't care about them anymore, emails from people who didn't love them anymore....

...Sigrid blinked once before realizing that she had spaced out thinking about all those things everyone did today instead of enjoying life or spending time with loved ones or helping others which seemed so important at first but then became lost in the cycle of life when suddenly everything changed because there was something wrong with this hotel....She glanced over at her soldier who had turned towards her now shaking his head weakly before asking: