previous : next

REEL SIX

...heroism does not reside in the flesh and blood of one person, but in a spiritual quality we confer upon him or her.

-- Rollo May

The Cry For Myth

----- * 0 * -----

40. INT. DR. HUGO’S LAIR – LATER

Habagat awakens, into pain.

His entire body is battered and bruised, his muscles sore and aching. This is the first thing he notices.

The second, that he is still blind.

(No. On further consideration, he feels the itching sensation which always accompanies the healing process.)

He realizes then that he cannot see because of some apparatus—something like opaque goggles—which is strapped to his head, covering his eyes.

He wants to scratch, at a spot just below the corner of his eye, but he finds he cannot move his arms: he is spread-eagled, back against a cold metal wall, with what feels like metallic cocoons encompassing his hands and forearms, as well as his legs, from his ankles to mid-thigh.

He is effectively imprisoned.

He struggles nonetheless, flexing sore, protesting muscles, straining, but the metallic shackles are strong, unyielding for the moment.

“Ah-ha!” Habagat hears, easily identifying Dr. Hugo’s voice, “You’re finally conscious.”

The mad doctor chuckles. “Those glasses I’ve made you wear—rather fashionable, I might add—are proof against your heat vision. You may have been blind when Tagabah brought you in, but my sensors indicate your optic nerves are healing quite rapidly now.” Soft sounds, of rustling paper. “And it looks like your eyeballs are once again fully formed. Amazing.”

Habagat keeps silent, doing his best to project his weakness, his fatigue, allowing the Doctor to speak, to prattle, the hero buying time, time for his body to heal.

“I must say,” Dr. Hugo continues, “the preliminary tests I’ve run on Tagabah have been very enlightening.

“Your musculature is astounding, Habagat. And please, don’t misinterpret. I mean that in a very scientific way.

“Normal human muscle is some 75% water. In your case, the consistency of that water is so much purer. I can’t explain it any better than that without losing you in jargon. It’s as if the bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen are far stronger than they ought to be.

“The speed of a single twitch of any of your body’s voluntary muscles is at a uniform speed of such agonizing slowness, you have absolutely no trouble with maintaining great amounts of force over prolonged periods of time.

“The number of muscle fibers in your body far outstrip the number in Homo sapiens. And not only are your muscle glycogen levels astronomical, thus speeding up resynthesis of lactic acid, but the alkali reserves of your muscle fibers and blood are monstrously high as well, making your lactic acid tolerance miraculous.

“Do you see? It takes so much for you to feel tired. To feel fatigue.”

Pero natalo pa rin ako ni Tagabah, the imprisoned Habagat thinks. Then, Tinalo ako ng sarili ko.

“Your blood helps, too,” the Doctor continues. “It carries oxygen to your system with such frightening efficiency. It’s almost as if there is no upper limit to the rate at which your blood is able to supply your body with oxygen. The term `maximum oxygen income’ has no bearing on you! The mechanical output you’re capable of is mind-boggling! Horse-power from a whole fleet of thoroughbreds. Fleets! Fleets and fleets…

“No. What are the collective terms for horses? Herd, yes? No. Harass? Ah! Troop. Troops. Battalions!

“Actually, when I think about it, `horse-power’ is rather demeaning and impractical when applied to you. Hmm. Leviathan-power! Behemoth-power!!”

Habagat imagines the Doctor swooning, and thinks he has to put an end to this rant, soon.

“The connective tissues… the chemical relationships… all so deliriously perfect and brutally efficient, a grown man could cry at the mere contemplation. And I’m not even talking about your skin yet, your organs…

“All the genetic material that, on a normal human being, would be junk DNA, is, in your body, utilized for various superhuman purposes. And the 90% of your brain that would be derelict were you like the rest of the human race, is likewise active!

“You are the perfect specimen of humanity. You are everything any man or woman has the potential to be!

“What I wouldn’t give to know what the catalysts were which turned you into the icon of perfection that you are! What—“

“Anong gagawin mo sa akin, Doctor?”

The question is asked simply, without fear, merely demanding a response (and effectively putting a proverbial bullet in the back of the rant’s proverbial head).

Dr. Hugo walks up to the mighty Habagat, cowed into submission by his intellect—mind over muscle (metamuscle, perhaps the right term, and if he had managed to subjugate even that, what then to call his brain, the weapon that had used Tagabah as ammunition to lay his enemy low? Metamind?)—and sneers.

“Experiments, Habagat.”

Nursing a suspicion, the imprisoned hero reaches out with his hearing, which allows him to hear into the sub- and infrasonic ranges. The hero nods, his jaw set, and firm.

“Parang si Tagabah. Experiment mo.”

“Yes. Isn’t he a fine specimen? Practice makes perfect, after all.”

“Hindi siya yung unang clone na ginawa mo?!” There is genuine shock in the hero’s words.

“Science is about the breakthrough, idiot! The one shining success after that long line of failures.”

“Anong ginawa mo sa mga unang clone?”

Habagat can hear the gleeful relish in the Doctor’s reply. “Experiments. Vivisections. Lobotomies. Tests for pain thresholds.”

Suddenly, savagely, Habagat feels an untold number of volts, surely in the millions, course through his still-healing body. His body bucks and spasms, quite out of his control at the moment, and he battles the pain, grits his teeth to avoid crying out.

Then the agony passes, the electricity switched off (for now), and Habagat can hear his own harsh, ragged breathing, deafening to his ears. And his muscles (if this is at all still possible) feel even more wasted than before.

The Doctor whoops, clearly amused at something. “I just took out the power grids for Visayas and most of Luzon. Heh. Tell me, how does that make you feel, suffering so much for the masses, knowing that the same thing that caused you so much pain, caused, at best, petty inconvenience for them?

“Well, except for the patients on life support…”

Habagat holds on firmly to his plan.

“Pi… pinatay mo yung… mga unang … clone…?”

“Still fixated on the clone issue, eh? Yes, if you must know. They were imperfect, after all. Not much good for anything else but spare parts.”

“Pero tao din sila!” There is a fire in Habagat’s words now, a tortured pain. “`Pag binigyan mo na sila ng buhay, tao na sila!”

“Oh, please,” Habagat hears the Doctor say, before the jagged ozone teeth shred into his muscles again.

But the jolt is mercifully short this time, as if merely to stop the hero’s rhetoric.

“Lab rats, Habagat, like you are right now. To do with as I will.

“None of you belong to yourselves! You’re mine! If I can twist Tagabah’s genetic structure as I please, then I can do the same to you!

“Even his mind is mine. He cannot help but hate you, because I’ve made him hate you.

“Like I said, Habagat. Lab rats. Nothing more.”

Smiling grimly, Habagat mouths the words with the faintest of breaths, of sound. Subvocally, he says, “Narinig mo `yon, Tagabah?”

There is a metallic rending then, and the startled, panicked sounds of Dr. Hugo, scrambling for safety.

Habagat hears the cold, merciless tones of his clone: “At ano kaya yung pli-nano mo para sa akin kung hindi ko natalo si Habagat, ha, Doc?”

To which the good Doctor can only reply with a strangled, sputtering sound.[1]

Habagat, marshalling his strength, strains, ignoring the screaming protests of his muscles, and the metallic shackles tear apart like so much tin foil.

He whips the goggles off his eyes, to reveal them whole, and healed.

He stands there for a moment, possibly the most powerful man in the cosmos, and, despite the absence of his cape, and the warped icon on his chest, Habagat is the epitome of the hero he has always been, and always will be.

He sees Tagabah then, holding a struggling Dr. Hugo by the shoulder.

“`Wag mo siyang saktan, Tagabah.” There is cold warning in Habagat’s words.

“Pinatay niya tayo!” his clone roars. “Yung mga kapatid natin!”

“At kung papatayin mo siya, di pareho lang kayo.”

Tagabah sneers. “Okey lang, basta patay na yung hayop na `to.”

“Puwes,” Habagat says, in that voice, crossing his muscular arms over his broad chest, “`di pa tayo tapos, Tagabah.”[2]

----- * 0 * -----

1 The Doctor really should have seen this coming though, as betrayal by assistant is nothing new to him.

His first sidekick, Gustav Gorilya, a gigantic mountain gorilla nearly as strong as Habagat and nearly as smart as Einstein (also a world-class debater with an amazing singing voice), likewise turned on his maker when it became clear that Dr. Hugo was not the conservasionist he claimed to be, blatantly ignoring the plight of Gorilla gorilla, family Pongidae.

Gustav has since returned to the wild, and is busy increasing the intellect of his brothers and sisters, aiming to build a hi-tech city from which he will wage war on the entire human race (and their protector, Habagat). [back]

2 What follows—in the succeeding episode—is a mad free-for-all, in which Habagat (still not fully recovered from his recent ordeals) is hard-pressed to battle both his evil clone and Dr. Hugo (with his death rays and assorted secret weapons, no less lethal for being old-school), while trying to keep Tagabah from throttling the good Doctor. The action sequences are intense, Luis pulling a double shift, as he has to do the stunts and fight scenes for both opponents.

In the end, though Habagat is able to leave the Doctor’s lair alive, both Hugo and Tagabah manage to elude capture. [back]

previous : next