The First Three: Box Set

For the first time ever, get Marcos Antonio Hernandez's first three books in one box set -- 50% OFF the price of the books together. This box set is ~800 pages in print and will be available to purchase or borrow in Kindle Unlimited.

Corvus Okada is the man who saved the world. It’s been mere days since he constructed a bomb, donned an exo suit, and singlehandedly destroyed the alien spacecraft hovering over the city of Bodalis. His inbox is blowing up with interview requests. People stop him on the streets to thank him.

There’s just one problem: It never happened.

There was no bomb. There was no spacecraft. There was only Corvus, the introverted gamer sitting in his lonely Phoenix hotel room the night before the International Non-Alcoholic Drinks Conference and beating Invader Assault.

Corvus doesn’t know why the old man in the coffee shop believes the events of the game really happened—nor the man in the taxi, or the woman sitting beside him on the flight home to Bodalis, or even his father. He doesn’t know why more new people believe it every day. But he does learn, fast, that not everyone who believes it thinks he’s a hero. Some think the Invader ship came to save the world. Some think Corvus destroyed their chance for salvation.

And they mean to repay him in kind.

The Operator is just passing through.

That’s what he tells the people of the polluted, rat-infested bottom levels of the city: just a man and his dog, Fenix, moving along from the dusty badlands en route to somewhere other than here.

But in a world where the wealthy and important occupy the higher levels of the massive towers above the impenetrable smog, the dregs of society left to fend for themselves down below, why would someone choose this place? Why would someone choose to stay in a pool hall with no patrons beyond the deactivated androids who took a seat at the bar one day and never left? Why would someone let himself be pulled in so immediately by a man as dangerous as Bacas, the government enforcer who runs the district from within the Suerte casino?

Soon the Operator is playing both sides of a gang war. He’s seeking out evidence against Bacas in abandoned railway tunnels occupied only by the deformed midliners. And whatever purpose brought him here—whatever addiction—it may well be more than one man and his dog can handle.

It was never Toño’s plan to leave El Salvador behind.

Toño has spent his entire life rising hours before dawn to feed the animals and mind the farm of his father Jose Angel. He wants nothing more than a plot of land and a farm of his own. And he knows exactly how to get it: make his way across the Mexican border to the United States of America, where he’ll earn enough money to help his family and himself.

It’s like Jose Angel says the day Toño leaves: “You always have a home to come back to.”

But the year is 1979. And the Salvadoran Civil War is about to begin.

Now Toño is working under the table for jewelers and roofers and cohabitating with his fellow immigrants, working every moment he can to secure his plans. He’s searching for a woman who might help him start his own family in El Salvador, and abandoning those who won’t sacrifice their dreams for his—all the while ignoring his father’s warnings of the chaos back home.

What happens when a dream disappears? In uncertain circumstances in an unfamiliar country, can you find another life to fight for?

The Education of a Wetback is a moving story of the haphazard, unexpected search for the American dream.