Dime Novels From Oblivion

The titanium warheads raining from the clouds like the falling stars foretold in revelations unleashed a global inferno. The flaming horizons billowed a thick choking smog that consumed the sky. The torments brought by the Promethean fires were a final punishment for the last kingdoms on earth that thought the substance of gods was malleable in their hands.
President Carter had spent Armageddon in a subterranean bunker. Separated from the world by several meters on reinforced concrete isolated from everyone besides his top advisors. Information filtered in through the remnants of the digital network. They were like a severed head taking its final few blinking glances at the world.
After 35 minutes they were all still alive, so it seemed the secret was safe, and the commander in chief and his brain trust could get to work solving this latest crisis. Many on the staff relished the idea of going down in history as being part of the cabinet that unified the nation in history's darkest…

The mountain of putrefying refuse was filled with the tiny bones of discarded infants. Every layer of the garbage mount was proliferated with their decomposing remains. All the way down to the very base of the rotting pyramid which had degraded into a foul liquid. As the city that the dump serviced expanded, so the peak grew higher and higher. As wealth poured in and people prospered more children found their way into the mound.
Lilya lost her parents at the age of nine. She hadn't been unceremoniously dropped into the pile as a baby, but without a family, she had lost her only tether to the wider world and found herself going where all discarded things go.
She lived off what she could scavenge from the fetid mass. She competed with the insects and other animals roaming the edges of the city for any edible morsels that might be hidden in the pile as well as with the other people who had no place in the civilization whose trash they fed on.
The sun was rising over the city. The tru…

The drones emerged from their cocoons of titanium and concrete and took to the skies to fulfill their collective purpose. The fully autonomous airborne drones had been lying dormant under the earth for nearly a decade. In all twenty-seven of them had been prepared, when the time arrived 19 of them rose from their bunkers. The way the solar powered machines glided quietly and gracefully through the open sky was almost serene, the scavengers, tribesman, and nomads who caught a glimpse of the all seeing eye sailing through the sky could only speculate about what they were or where they might have come from.
They didn't know the mechanical Phoenix arisen from the ashes of the old world only had a very limited lifespan. Once their power ran out or any part of them failed mechanically wherever they crashed would be their final resting place and in a relatively short time they would all be gone.
The airborne machine swept the vast countryside for any signs of organized society. It was h…

By the time a more advanced race dwelling among the distant stars traversed the black gulf of space and landed on earth, they found the species that had reached out into the endless void in the hope they would find they weren't alone in the darkness. The civilization that heard this cry took the initiative as a sign humanity was a species that desired mutual prosperity and cooperation and were at once eager to respond to the call.
The grand cities that had once been the steel citadels of humanities most complex social institutions were quiet ruins, and all that remained of the simian creatures were their slightly curved vertebrates and hollow skulls.
There were some salvageable remnants. The globe was littered with intact artifacts still serviceable long after it's creators vanished.  All the information generated by humans had been digitized and inscribed into the microchips of plastic devices. Everything any researcher could ever know about the enigmatic homo sapiens was loc…