Infected: Die Like Supernovas (The Outlaw Book 2) by Alan Janney Read Free Book Online

Outlaw made an appearance on top of his favorite haunt, the rooftop of a condominium building that houses famous movie starlet Natalie North.”
    “This would be newsworthy enough, but the story only grows more outlandish. We know about this Outlaw sighting because apparently dozens of amateur photojournalists installed cameras zeroed in on that particular rooftop, all eager to capture the masked man in action. As you can see in this raw footage, the Outlaw leaps into the screen and stops in front of the rooftop door, perhaps waiting for Natalie North? We don’t know yet. But then, the bizarre happens. The Outlaw is attacked!”
    I sat up straighter, riveted to the screen. Holy moly! This was actual real footage!
    “On the bottom of your screen you’ll see two individuals sneak up behind the Outlaw and capture him! A bag is forced over his head, and his hands and feet are bound. Watch as the Outlaw is hoisted up and carried off, and the whole attack happens in a matter of seconds.”
    I stared, spellbound, as the screen replayed the incident over and over. The camera wasn’t very close, obviously situated in one of the office windows surrounding the building. Carter could move so fast! And who was that dark figure helping him? The Shooter?
    “However, the story still isn’t over. With all the cameras that exist in our world today, we should be able to get another glimpse of where the Outlaw was taken, but no other footage exists. In fact, most of the footage that existed of this incident has inexplicably vanished. Let me repeat, the video that you just saw is the only remaining video of the capture. All of the other data has been erased. Here is our correspondent Joe Walsh with more.”
    The camera switched to a man in glasses sitting at a computer. He said, “Forty-eight hours ago, the digital community witnessed a computer hack like nothing the world has ever seen, and it all centers on this character, the Outlaw. All known footage of Tuesday’s Outlaw incident has simply vanished. I mean, the video data has been erased. Wiped clean. Personal computers, servers, data warehouses, cellphones…all gone. It’s the most impressive virus ever documented. Someone, some unnamed mysterious computer genius has apparently built a program that crawls across the entire internet and all the hard-drives and also all the intranets, and does it incredibly fast. What does the program do? That’s what the most brilliant minds on the planet are working on right now. But this is the only plausible explanation we can come up with for how all of the video and all of the data on all of the computers were hit at the same time. Or at least, all hit within minutes of each other. This virus found every piece of video from Tuesday night’s Outlaw appearance… and permanently deleted it.”
    “You may be wondering,” the man continued, adjusting his spectacles, “how this one video remains. How did Channel Four news get a copy of it, when all other copies were destroyed? Well, the answer is simple. This video wasn’t stored digitally. In other words, it wasn’t stored on a computer. Our video was shot with an out-of-date camcorder and stored on a physical cartridge not connected to the internet. Brilliant, right? However when the journalist tried to email us his video, the email was intercepted and deleted! This super virus is scanning millions of emails every minute! One of our tech guys drove to the journalist’s house and physically retrieved the cartridge containing the video that you just viewed.
    “So the real question is, why this Outlaw incident? Why would this computer hacker, or group of hackers more likely, choose to reveal their existence with this stunt? What, exactly, is being hidden?”
    “And where is the Outlaw? And is he safe?” the news anchor returned to the screen and kept talking. Just then, one of my phones buzzed.
    I had two phones. Or rather, Chase Jackson had one phone. And the Outlaw had another phone.