Nick Cole - The Wasteland Saga

“What happened to you?” asked the Old Man.

The Man of Sorrows smiled and spoke softly. “I was wounded in the house of a friend.”

As if what had happened had only been some small misunderstanding.

And then he hugged the Old Man tightly, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

And there was music.

The most beautiful music I have ever heard. All those years in the desert and I had forgotten what music really is.

And somewhere in it, he heard his granddaughter’s laugh.

You take everything with you.

Walking into it now, his wife’s hand about his arm, eagerly pulling him forward along the river and into the wonders beyond words, he thought, ‘What a strange adventure.’

I’d like to thank you for reading these books. I hope you had a good time, and I apologize about the tough parts. If it helps, I felt so awful for everything that I’d done to everyone in The Savage Boy . Jin, Sergeant Presley, and Horse deserved better. I hope we ended well in spite of those dark times.

Again, thank you. I look forward to our next time together. If you get a chance, swing by my website at nickcolebooks.comor find me on Twitter @nickcolebooks and say hi.

NICK COLEis an army veteran and actor living in Southern California. When he is not auditioning for commercials, going out for sitcoms, or being shot, kicked, stabbed, or beaten by film school students, he can often be found working as a guard for King Philip II of Spain or in a similar role in Don Carlo at Los Angeles Opera.

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Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Cover photograph © by the Marsden Archive/Alamay

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC.

THE SAVAGE BOY. Copyright © 2013 by Nick Cole.

First HarperCollins e-books edition: February 2013

THE OLD MAN AND THE WASTELAND. Copyright © 2012 by Nick Cole.

First HarperCollins e-books edition: July 2012

Various quotes within are from the novel The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright © 1952 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1980 by Mary Hemingway. All rights reserved.

THE WASTELAND SAGA. Copyright © 2013 by Nick Cole. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-221019-7

EPUB Edition © OCTOBER 2013

ISBN 9780062210203

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