A major problem with most post-apocalyptic survival fiction is that there is that there always has to be some stupid shortcut that makes 99% of humanity irrelevant in the picture.
And you might be saying "Yeah duh, man. That's an apocalypse." Well no, it's really not. There are fast and slow apocalypses, and if you want to play soldier, you need a fast apocalypse. There are just too many goddamn people for you to be a one-man army against. In your wildest, wettest dreams, you versus 20 desperate, starving mooks is a fair fight. You live in a town with a population of 45,000 and you're arguably in the metro area of a city with a population of a million. You need something to make them gone for you, right fucking now.
The thing is, there are only two sufficiently fast apocalypses: nuclear war or a meteor strike. But those are also really fucking hard to survive. You need an apocalypse that can actually be a weird sort of afterthought after your White Man accepts his Burden: to clear the land of savages.
So you need something else. Zombies were great during the oughts, but it quickly became clear that they have a power creep problem. You start out shitting yourself, and in the end you're casually sticking potato peelers in their ears. You always need some wildly implausible disaster to keep you on the run. You conclude man is the real monster, and you play soldier, and... well, wait. Why fucking bother? What are you even trying to do, here?
But what about solar flares and EMP attacks? Okay. The cause is fast. But the actual apocalypse is slow. If you look at the list of things humans need to survive, electricity isn't really one of them. For you, that's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you don't have to jump through too many hoops to figure out how your protagonist survives it. It's a curse because you need to find a reason almost nobody else did. The Jared Chronicles tried to deal with this by creating this rumor that ships would arrive at the coast bringing supplies, and you could fish to survive. The entire easily duped population of California hit the coast where of course there were no ships, and wiped themselves out. How convenient that our protagonist only heard this rumor after it had already cleared much of the cities for him!
The ugly truth of apocalyptic survival is that you will never, ever be equipped to be the Last Man on Earth when the tech goes away. Not anyone reading this post, anyway. Your best shot is with other people, and not just the kind you can make positive moral judgements about at gunpoint.
