Read Winchester Undead (Book 2): Winchester: Prey for Free Online Page B

and at least as wide, all of it well lit with overhead lighting. Clint drove to a large metal door with another keypad. After entering another series of numbers, the large metal blast door slowly swung outward.
    “The geyser of water in the lake was from this place,” said Clint. “The interior was sealed with pure nitrogen to preserve everything, to keep any contaminants out and to prevent any organisms from taking home.”
    “OK, fine, but why here? Why this part of Texas? I don’t understand.”
    “Do you remember the Superconductor Super Collider that was canceled back in the early 1990s?”
    “Yeah, vaguely.”
    “OK, this is the result of that project. From the beginning, the entire project was a front to build this facility. The scientists didn’t know that, the workers didn’t know that, no one knew it except a small number of people cleared into this black project. The SSC was never intended to be completed, so cost overruns and some skillful manipulation of the media helped push public pressure to cancel the project, just as we planned. The tunnel-boring machine continued with a new series of contractors past the publicly known fourteen miles of tunnel to here, which is under the lake we drove across. Just a bit over two hundred feet below the lake, actually.”
    “Is there anyone else here?”
    “Can’t be. When the startup sequence started, the geyser you saw was the nitrogen being purged and replaced by air we can breathe. Before that happened, the air inside would have killed anyone trying to breathe it.”
    “What do we do now?”
    “We go inside, take hot showers, put on new clothes, have a hot meal and try to figure out if any of my other teammates from my project survived. We have a mission to complete.”
    “What project is that?”
    “Project Lazarus.”

CHAPTER 7
     
    Cortez, CO
    February 13, Year 1
     
    Jake stood on a table in the middle of the cafeteria, addressing his group of survivors. As of this morning, with the birth of a healthy baby girl, the number of souls in the school-turned-survivor-commune had grown to forty-two. Scavenging operations were planned in detail and now had the added needs for a newborn. They were carried out by rotating teams of men. While one team held the operations slot for three days, another team provided compound security for a day shift, and the third held the security job for a night shift. A fourth team stood down for three days of rest and family time. The three day rotation seemed to work well now that there were enough people to man the teams and keep the rotation running. Perhaps as more people arrived and became a part of the survivor group, the rotations could be spread out with more down time. That would be a welcome logistical problem to overcome, but the other side to that coin was with more people came the need for more supplies. For the past nine days the scavenging teams had been harassed by The Tribe. So far the religious fanatics hadn’t attacked the middle school, but they were laying ambushes for the scavenging team while they were outside of the fence.
    From the roof of the middle school the security teams could see the highway west of the football stadium and had a clear view of approach, but the scattering of homes to the east gave The Tribe cover to move for an attack. During the past four weeks special scavenging trips had been completed for supplies and a chain-link fence was now erected surrounding the school grounds from Maple Street down to Second Street and Pine to tie into the fence already standing around the athletic complex. So far the fence has been successful in keeping the walkers out of the school building and off the property, although there had been an increase in the number of walkers coming to the fence line.
    For Jake, Sara, and the others in their group, life was going as well as it could be given their current situation—that is, until the religious nuts showed up. Not a single person in their group had