Rise of The Iron Eagle (The Iron Eagle Series Book 1) by Roy A. Teel Jr. Page B

maneuvers. He’s been fortunate in his forty years living in the hills and has never had to evacuate. The van pulls up to a large solid steel gate, and he pushes a remote. The gate creeks slowly open, and he pulls the van in as it closes behind him. He backs up to a small storage container he has set next to the cabin. He opens the container doors and the van’s back doors and drags each of the men into the container. Inside, a crude lighting system has been erected. A patch of hay is in the corner of the unit – a makeshift bed for those unfortunate enough to occupy the container. Bolted to the walls are several different types of restraints, some steel and others leather; there are a litany of different power tools, saws, drills, belt sanders, grinders. The average person would think it was your run of the mill workshop, but it was anything but.
    He pulled his victims over onto the hay and grabbed a long leather whip and began to shout instructions to the men to disrobe. When they resisted, he began striking them repeatedly until both men were undressed and cowering in the corner on the hay. “You two smell like pigs; you should be ashamed of yourselves.” Mounted to one of the steel walls was a fire hose, spooled on a hose rack with a high pressure nozzle on the end of it; it was hooked up to a fire hydrant in the middle of the unit. “You need to be cleaned,” he said as he was unspooling the hose. There was a hydrant key in place, and he turned it to open the valve and then began spraying the men. The two were still dazed and had no idea where they were or what was happening. They were screaming, “Why…why are you hurting me…why…I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.” Their screams and pleas were the first shot of adrenaline he received from his prey. He loved the sound of begging and pleading in the opening hours of his time with the Swine he had captured. He turned off the hose and rolled it back up. The clothes were picked up and thrown into an old oil drum with the top cut off that he used for his victims’ laundry. The men were separated and each chained to the wall, one on each side facing each other. Their bare flesh burned against the hot steel container as he lashed them tight to the unit walls; they screamed against the restraints, fearing what might happen next.

    Jim and Steve sat at a small table in the back of Santiago’s bar in East LA. The small restaurant and bar had been in the Santiago family for nearly five generations. In a part of a city riddled with gang violence, drug trafficking, and prostitution, Santiago’s was a bastion of safety for locals and strangers. Nothing violent from the area was allowed inside or within a thousand feet of its walls; this was a rule handed down from generation to generation and passed on to the neighborhood where it sat. No one ever crossed the line at Santiago’s! Javier Santiago was the fifth generation operator and at seventy-seven was grooming his thirty-five-year-old son, Valente, to take over the business. Santiago’s was the only public establishment where you could walk in on a Friday night and find gang members of every race and affiliation, warring or not, drinking, talking, partying, and having a good time. The bar was the stuff that urban legends are made of. The stories of how it came to be were as varied as the groups that inhabited the bar.
    The most credible story, and the one that Javier verified, was that in 1906 after the great earthquake in San Francisco, a lot of the survivors fearing more destruction left the city and moved south settling in LA. The bar at that time was one of the few watering holes for both horses as well as people. One evening, a fight broke out between three men of varying ethnicities. Javier’s first generation relative took a shot gun from behind the bar, and, without saying a word, shot all three men dead then dragged their bodies into the street and stacked them on top of each other. When the