Five minutes before six in the morning. That was what the clock indicated. Charles laid his eyes back on his lazily gripped newspaper. An article caught his heed for more than five seconds, which was four seconds longer than his average attention span:

~Seven teenager’s lifeless bodies were discovered early this morning by one of the forest rangers. ~

“All the lunatics come out to play… On full moon nights,” That was his first thought upon reading that title.

In a town such as GrayBird, one knows better than to disregard the lunar phases, a natural event, innocuous to the rest of humanity or at least to its large majority.

In GrayBird town, one has better learn fast and never forget, for he has much to lose otherwise.

Charles slackly uncrossed his legs, then lifted them off the worn out table that served him as a desk. He walked the great distance of six steps to reach the door of the dilapidated loge that served as a makeshift guard’s office.

New day, new shift for him. Five years doing that job, yet he could never manage to shake that sensation of dread that creeped in on his nerves at the beginning of each work day.

He sure owned the face of someone that had long since forfeited their desire to live. There wasn’t an apparent part of him that looked well taken care of, not his clothes, not his hair, not his beard… But the worst in the sight of him, was the empty look in his eyes. He ambled towards his work station in his usual unexisting enthusiasm.

“Leonard,” he greeted his colleague with the warmth of a prison door.

“Charles,” he was greeted back with the same lack of energy.

Leonard stood off that frayed wooden chair he was resting on. That was it for them, that was how their interactions went until, “Good luck kid,” Leonard uttered before the distance between them grew too long.

Charles didn’t say anything, there was nothing to say when the best of luck one could have in their line of work was, for nothing to happen during one’s shift.

Leonard seemed to be on the older side to Charles, although he appeared to share the same rundown looks of his younger colleague.

As soon as Charles had laid his weight on that little chair that… Frankly seemed to be holding on to dear life, an old and frail looking lady arrived by his side, “Morning Charles my dear, I brought your favorite today,”

“Thank you, Mrs. Dale,” he mustered after he’d finally noticed her. He accepted the cute basket she’d so generously offered him and put it on the floor next to his leg.

“It’s a heavy looking day, isn’t it?” she said as she peered at the morning sky.

“Let’s hope not Mrs. Dale,” was all he could say.

People in town were nice to Charles and took care of him whenever they could, in every which way they could. They felt as though they owed him that, for everyday of his life he spent working a job that nobody else wanted, that everyone else fled like the plague.

In every other place on god’s earth, there were these jobs that a lot of people feared taking on, whether for their high complexity levels or for the sheer weight of the responsibilities that came with the jobs alone.

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Anyone competent or insane enough to dare volunteer for one, was regarded as a hero regardless of either reason; in GrayBird, that job was the guardian of town.

A guardian’s job normally consisted of surveilling a certain area of a precise perimeter, to keep unwanted individuals from wandering inside. Not in GrayBird; there, things were different. There was officially only one entrance to GrayBird, one way in and one way out.

Charles and Leonard were in charge of keeping an eye out for it, for the lurkers.

Charles spazzed in his chair when he felt the morning cold reach his bones, the temperature was way lower than that of the previous day at the same time. He looked around himself, almost like he’d just noticed that Mrs. Dale had already left. He swayed his seat back and forth as he rubbed his hands together to fight the shivers.

He could barely see his white foggy breath, the white fog surrounding him was very thick that morning.

He decided it was time to pull the fabric napkin covering the basket off, for it to reveal a number of delicious looking chocolate muffins, neatly nested near each other inside. He wasn’t hungry per say, he was just very bored.

Good thing he decided to savor his first bite, because it turned out to be his last, on that day at least.

He suddenly stopped the chewing process, his face gradually falling, further apart from his usual pitiable demeanor. He dropped what he was holding between his fingers, forcibly swallowed and slowly stood off his chair.

There, in the middle of the road, right before the town’s welcome sign, stood a blurry humanoid figure; it was moving, getting closer to him.

“Shit,” he muttered.

His feet finally obeyed his commands. They moved forward, slowly at first but gradually gaining in speed, and Charles ran as fast as he could towards the figure. Then, just like he began running, he stopped dead in his tracks, staring intensely at the being barely standing in front of him, ”Hello…” he said, not very hopeful, “Can you hear me?” he attempted again.

Just as he thought, there was no hope to be had with her, the figure who turned out to be a woman, just kept on walking ahead with complete disregard to Charles’ presence. She was bare feet, barely clothed for that weather and had deep lacerations all the way up her legs, but her eyes… Her eyes were another story. If Charles thought he had the stare of the dead, what she had was on a whole different level.

Although Charles had lost the enthusiasm he had on his first day on the job, he still held the same ritual as the first time he saw a lurker, he never learned to deal with their lifeless eyes, he was never able to react the way he was instructed to.

He’d hoped that… Someday, upon saying hello to a lurker, they’d say hi back or ask for help or… Say anything for that matter.

When he finally accepted the fact that the encounter was not going to be any different from others, he resorted to his instructions. He picked his walkie in order to reach the town’s authorities, ”Lurker incoming,” was all he managed to say.

He allowed his arm to fall back to his side. He kept on eying the woman who… Kept on walking, completely ignoring the fact that Charles was standing right in her way, like there was nothing there so, he slowly removed himself from her path and… She carried on like nothing had happened.

Charles had to bear the sight of her moving carcasse for five minutes straight, he was used to feeling his days go by slowly but that felt like another kind of slow, five whole minutes until an ambulance and a cruiser joined him on site.

He had to wait for hours to finally hear a bit of information about her. They reported back to him that, in the end she did speak, but only to utter one word, a name: Elena.

She kept on saying it again and again, they thought it was her name, they thought that her name was all she could remember about her former self.

Other than that, she had nothing on her, no ID, nothing to tie her back to the person she left behind before engaging on the road to GrayBird town.

New day, new shift for him, five years doing that job, yet he could never manage to shake that sensation of dread that came with the encounter of a lurker.

What are lurkers, one might ask? They are people, or at the very least they used to be, but they are no more.

They say that GrayBird town never had many visitors, but nobody really lays out the "whys" and the "for whats" of it.

There was only one way to GrayBird and one way out of it, and nobody ever knows what really happens on that cursed road.

All of those that engage on that path, either never reach their destination or… Become lurkers, barely alive creatures devoid of any sanity. Their memories erased, doomed to remain empty husks forever.