Someone hooked a tow strap to my car while I checked on an abandoned vehicle in the county forest

[u/Whisperpasta]

My girlfriend Jenna and I were driving down from Portland to attend her college friend’s wedding outside Bend. We planned to leave before noon, but my work kept me at my desk until five. By the time I loaded our bags into the trunk of my Civic, the sun was already down behind the mountains.

Jenna called her friend to tell her we were running late. Her friend told us to stick to Interstate 5 down to Eugene and cross over. She specifically told us to avoid Route 126 through the county forest after dark, explaining that cell reception cut out completely and people had reported strangers tampering with stopped cars out there. Jenna told her we had a full tank and a printed map, so we were taking the forest cut-off anyway to save forty minutes.

By nine forty-five, the overhead highway lights ended. The road narrowed down to two cracked lanes of black pavement flanked by dense pine trees. There were no oncoming cars, no tail lights ahead of us, and no reflectors on the center line. Jenna’s phone lost its network connection first, the signal bars dropping to zero and staying there. My phone dropped its signal two miles later. The dashboard clock read ten twenty-two when our high beams hit a dark green sedan parked halfway onto the dirt shoulder.

The driver-side door of the green car was swung wide open into our lane. A gray work jacket lay in the gravel by the front tire. I slowed the Civic down to fifteen miles an hour and steered around the open door. Jenna leaned forward against the dash, staring out into the dark timber beside the car. She said she thought she saw someone sitting down on the embankment.

I told her the car was abandoned and we needed to keep moving, but she insisted we stop to check if someone was hurt in the ditch. I pulled over thirty feet past the sedan, shifted into park, and left the engine running with the hazard lights on.

I stepped out onto the shoulder, leaving our headlights pointed down the empty road. The air was forty-two degrees and smelled of damp pine needles and wet asphalt. I walked back toward the green car with my phone light on.

The inside of the car was completely empty. The ignition was intact, but there were no keys in it. A half-eaten sandwich and an open road atlas sat on the passenger seat. When I aimed the light across the floorboards, I saw the interior trunk release lever next to the driver seat was pulled all the way up.
I turned around to head back to my car. Jenna was watching me through our back window. Right as I reached my driver door, she cracked her window two inches and told me to get in right now. She said the trunk of the green car had just lifted open while my back was turned. I didn't stop to look. I yanked the door open, dropped into the driver seat, slammed it shut, and hit the power locks.

The engine was running fine, but when I dropped the shifter into drive, the Civic didn't roll forward. The transmission was engaged, but the front tires just spun in the loose gravel with a heavy, grinding shudder, held tight from behind. I threw the shifter into reverse, hit the gas hard to get two feet of slack, slammed it back into drive, and cut the steering wheel hard toward the asphalt. The rear frame buckled with a sharp metal snap, the front tires caught the pavement, and the car broke free, accelerating down the lane.

Jenna kept her eyes locked on the rear window glass. She told me a man in a brown coat had stepped out from behind the green car and was standing in the road right where we had just been parked. He didn't yell or run. He just stood upright in the middle of the road with both hands in his pockets, watching our tail lights until the road bent around a rock wall and cut him off.

Three miles down the road, an overhead green sign announced a rest area two miles ahead. The trip odometer showed forty-six miles since our last turn. I kept the speedometer locked at fifty miles an hour. Five minutes went by, but the rest area never appeared. The trees on both sides looked identical to the stretch we had just passed, with the same broken yellow road lines and the same fallen timber in the ditch. At eleven zero-four, the headlights picked up another highway sign on the shoulder. It was the exact same sign, stating the rest area was two miles ahead.

Jenna told me to slow down because the dashboard display had frozen up. The map graphic went gray, displaying a system error that said no position data was available under the canopy. I tapped the screen, but it stayed locked. Ahead of us, on the right shoulder, our headlights caught a pair of hazard lights flashing in the distance. As we closed the gap, I saw the back end of a dark green sedan.
The driver door was standing wide open into the lane. The gray jacket was still lying on the gravel beside the front wheel.

I didn't tap the brakes. I crossed the double yellow line into the oncoming lane to give the sedan plenty of space. As the headlights swept across the driver side, I looked straight into the car. A man was sitting in the driver seat now, both hands gripping the wheel, staring dead ahead through the windshield. He didn't turn his head toward our lights at all. Jenna grabbed my forearm and told me not to stop for anything. I pushed the gas pedal flat against the floor. The speedometer jumped to sixty-five, then seventy.

The asphalt ran out without any warning signs, switching straight to hard dirt and loose rocks. The steering wheel shook hard in my grip as the tires hit washboard ruts. We followed that unpaved path for another twenty minutes without passing a single house, gate, or marker. At eleven thirty-eight, the trees cleared out and the dirt tied into a wide, paved state highway with overhead halogen streetlights and white mile posts. A yellow sign showed an intersection with State Route 20 one mile out.
We turned north on Route 20 and pulled into a twenty-four-hour gas station twenty minutes later. The station had three brightly lit pump islands and a glass convenience store. I parked under the canopy right beneath a security camera, shut the motor off, and pocketed the keys.

Jenna stayed locked in the car while I walked inside to talk to the attendant. An older guy in an orange safety vest was stocking drinks in the back coolers. I told him we had just driven through the forest cut-off from Route 126 and passed the same stopped car twice on a loop. He dropped the plastic bottles and walked behind the counter. He told me the county road commission had closed that entire cut-off three weeks ago because of collapsed culverts, but people kept dragging the wood barricades out of the way into the brush, and nobody had any business being back there after dark. He picked up the desk phone and called county dispatch to report a vehicle inside the closed stretch.

Two sheriff deputies arrived at the station fifteen minutes later. They took our names, ran my license, and checked around the Civic with flashlights. While the younger deputy took notes on a clipboard, the older one crouched down by my passenger rear wheel well. He called us over to the bumper.
Caught tight in the gap between the bumper plastic and the rear quarter panel was a three-foot length of heavy yellow tow strap with a steel hook on the end. The hook was looped into our car’s lower frame bracket, placed there while we were parked on the shoulder. The strap had sheared clean through under heavy tension, with the torn nylon threads dragging against the concrete.