Deadbreak.

Before the outbreak, Jay was the kind of person who fixed things — appliances, cars, whatever broke. Not a hero. Not even particularly prepared. He kept a small toolkit in his truck out of habit, not foresight, and that toolkit is one of the reasons he's still alive.

The Deadbreak series moves Jay through five books of wreckage: a Costco stripped to the concrete and turned into a fort, an amusement park that runs on its own logic after dark, a hospital ship where the hierarchy of the old world is trying very hard to reassert itself. The tone shifts as the world does. Bleak where it has to be, dry when Jay's interior monologue gets the better of him. His crew has the same kind of dings as Serenity's. They bicker, they cover for each other, they remember things they'd rather forget.

That's the reason people stay for five books. Choices Jay made in Book 1 have weight in Book 4. The found family takes losses it doesn't recover from cleanly. The series doesn't promise survival; it promises that whatever happens, the people who caused it will have to live with it.