For those of you who have not seen the Walking Dead, the following scene occurred in Season One, Episode Six

Centres for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia, approximately two months since the Dead began to Walk.

Edwin Jenner tried to hand the vodka to the redneck, whose name in his fuddled state he could not recall, but the man snatched at it with a mixture of irritation and perhaps desperation.

"It was the French," he breathed softly. He moved to walk the stairs.

"What?" the pretty blonde woman asked, confused.

He sighed to himself. "They were the last ones to hold out, as far as I know." He looked at her intently, trying simultaneously to bury memories and to resurrect them, the pain of the former not quite as urgent as the necessity of the latter. "While our people were bolting out the doors and committing suicide in the hallways, they stayed at their labs until the end. They thought that they were close to a solution." This time, he did turn, and the memories burned away as he looked at the vacant console.

"What happened?" the older African American woman asked, completely without understanding of what he was saying or, worse, its implication.

"The same thing that's happening here," he replied with almost a chuckle from the depths of a gallows. "No power grid. Ran out of juice." He pointed with both hands to the powerless consoles. "The world runs on fossil fuels. I mean, how stupid is that?"

Except, 76% of France's power generation comes from nuclear energy. What if they held out just that little bit longer?

_

No one missed Erik Hossen. He was just a farmer, whose daughter had died of exposure some years before and whose flocks were thin, even by the hungry standards of the barren rock known as Dragonstone. His disappearance from his hovel on the north corner of the island was explained by his neighbours in a dozen different ways, none more convincing or less fanciful than the last, for it was easy for a young man with few friends to fall from the cliffs or be picked off by a predator without notice. After a few days, the rumours ceased and life began to go on. Most spoke about their Lord Stannis' recent defeat at the Blackwater and the loss of half his hoste, many of whom they had known.

For Colonel Jean-Marie Leclerc, of the French Armée de Terre, Erik Hossen was the key to learning how to speak the langauge of Westeros. Because Corsica could not hold and feed more than 700,000 frightened refugees for long. The mostly French, but some Germans and Italians with a smattering of other nationalities, needed a new home. The European mainland was thronged with the dead, and it was to Corsica that the only fully cured survivors had fled, having annihilated the 300,000 or so dead inhabitants, the shambling corpses no match for the gunfire of the French Army and Navy, ably and desperately assisted by elements of the Bundeswehr and some few gunships from the Italian army. How the reactor on the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle had somehow imploded and created this ... portal ... to somewhere else was something about which Leclerc did not dwell. The drones showed the edge of a new continent scarcely smaller than Europe, with a medieval population not even one hundredth the size. One did not look such gift horses where they might bite.