Let me tell you about: Richard Preston's The Cobra Event

Are you kidding? 1998?

That was a lifetime ago. I could not even remember where in the world I bought the book. Maybe, it seemed my affair with books began in a secondhand bookstore. This was no exception.

This book was published in 1998, and it caused quite a stir in White House back then. A lone terrorist could unleash terror upon the unsuspecting world, it seemed, and within the pages of this novel, the plan seemed infallible.

The book began with a typical girl's waking hours before going to a school in New York with a terminal difference: she had a cold. As the chapter progresses, her cold turns into something more sinister, life-threatening, cannibalistic. It ends with her dying in the arms of her arts teacher, who, by no long stretch of imagination, must have been infected by whatever that kills her just now.

Enter Alice Austen, an adept forensic pathologist, and Will Hopkins, a Special Agent of the FBI. Both have their own issues, but that matters little, because their paths are about to converge in the heart of the malice known as Cobra. As they watch people they like (and don't like) self-cannibalise and die (in that order), they must race against a lone terrorist whose idea of changing the world does not involve the man in the mirror, but the world as a whole.

This book came out before the CSI was even on TV, and yet the details in there (whenever Austen goes to the morgue and starts cutting on the bodies) are as tantalising as they are repelling. I was always looking forward to the next possibility of another body spread out under the white light while Austen picks and prods her way in it, looking for answers. Hopkins was the masculine side of the story, putting into action what Austen has in words.

This was no literature feat by any means, but in the end, one cannot help but wonder the next time a bulb breaks in the subway train whether it contained nadir gases or something else more deadly...