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It was the shifting of the car, the change in the engine sounds, that woke me up from the uneasy and fitful sleep I’d managed to get. I woke up, my eyes taking a few moments to adjust to the view of the inside of the RV we were traveling in. I’d crashed out on the couch, tired after having driven this behemoth of a vehicle for the previous eight hours or so. Thankfully it hadn’t been terribly windy, but enough that with every large gust of wind, the damned bus wanted to wallow back and forth across the highway lanes like a sail. Fighting through that, and having to stay more alert keeping on the road and in the proper lane, had tired me out.

Erica had elected to drive, then, letting me have some time to try and rest; rest it seemed that I had needed, though now I was idly wondering where we were.

“Hey hon,” I called up to the front of the RV, just a few feet above my head, as I shifted on the couch to sit up, “everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she called out, as she was slowing down; I took a quick look around, and saw that we weren’t on the highway anymore. “I was feeling a little nibbly, and saw a sign for a Chic-Fil-A, so I figured we’d stop here in town and get a bite.”

“Where are we?” I asked, trying to see a sign out of the front window; failing that, I took a quick look around the side windows, hoping to see something that would give me a clue as to where we were.

“Some little town named Benton,” she remarked, as she turned off the off-ramp and began driving in the direction of what looked like a town.

Benton.

Something about that name pinged a thought in my mind, but it didn’t stick around, and for the moment, I shrugged it off.

It didn’t take very long for us to slide into town, and at first it looked…quaint. Small. Like one of those little towns that the highways bypassed a few decades ago. It was close enough to the highway but it didn’t seem like it had been touched by modernization. There was still a soda-shop on one of the corners as we drove through, and all of the people I could see, were dressed a bit more to the “Sunday dress” than I would have expected of a more modern town. Here and there I saw a few turn-of-the-century notes— a McDonalds that had, thankfully, been brought up to at least the appearance of the 90s- but for the most part, it could have been a town that time forgot, sometime after the 70s or thereabouts.

But something pinged the back of my mind again, and I frowned.

“Where is that Chic-Fil-A?” Erica groused, more to herself.

That -something- in my head clicked once. I took a better look at the people on the streets, and then my gaze turned back to Erica for a moment, looking at the back of her head, catching a glimpse of her ear.

My frown deepened, and that -something- clicked a second time.

“We’re still in Kentucky, right?” I asked, feeling a sense of foreboding.

“Yeah,” Erica tossed back at me over her shoulder, and then gave an almost inaudible squeal, followed by a “there it is,” to herself, as she angled into the turning lane to make a turn to take her to our destination.

Something was really wrong; my brain was shouting at me that there was something very not right about this situation; I had a sudden urge to look at a map to see exactly where in the heck ‘Benton, Kentucky’ was.

I got the map pulled up, as Erica was slowing down to turn into the restaurant parking lot. It didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t know, but I was still worried, and that worry was rapidly shifting towards fear. I went to check a search engine site about Benton, and what came up made my blood run cold.

“Erica,” I said, “we need to go, right now.”

“Huh?” She blurted, slowing down to try and find a place she could park the RV.

“We need to go,” I repeated, “what time is it?”

“Hon, we just got here,” she offered up a complaint, then added, “The dash clock says it’s about a quarter to six.”

“Fuck Chic-Fil-A,” I snapped, “We need to leave- we REALLY need to leave, NOW!”

“What? Why?” She pulled the RV to a stop, put the bus in park, and turned to look at me.

“Benton is a sundown town!”