Landscape lighting not working

HI, About 3 weeks ago, I thought we had a lightning strike close to the house. All was well except the landscape lighting stopped working. I tested the tranformer/timer and it was toast. I replaced it, and tested the system. The 7 lights in the back yard worked, the 7 in the front yard did not. I check a few bulbs and they were ok. I check the voltage at those same fixtures and they were dead. I started pulling on wires from each fixture and ended up at a sort of junction point in the middle of the front yard. I disconnected all of the wires from this point which turned out to be 7. I turned the transformer back on and the lights in the back went on, the ones in the front were dead. I checked the heavier duty wire that seemed to be coming from the direction of the new transformer and it read 12v, so I was confident I had the curcuit for the front yard. I wired back one fixture to this line, checked it with the multimeter and got zeros, I take the fixture wires off and I get 12v. Why would this be? I did this for 3 seperate fixtures and got the same results. Also, none of the lights came on either.