It started at the beginning of the best part of my life. Me and Mary had gotten married at the young age of 25 and 24 respectively, and thanks to my parent’s riches, neither of us will ever have to work a day in our lives. So, on our honeymoon, we said “fuck it” and decided that the sooner we had kids, the better. But after about a week of trying, something went wrong.
“Jesus! My legs hurt like hell…” said Mary, startling me awake at 3AM.
“Huh…? Oh. I’m sure it’s just a cramp.” With that, I fell back to sleep. But even when I awoke, I saw her staring at the ceiling, eyes bloodshot, legs twitching. She was clearly in pain. This time, my well-rested and reasonable mind deduced that something was clearly wrong, so I lifted away the covers and took a look at her thighs. To my shock, they seemed a bit thicker than they were the day before. Along with that, pronounced yellow veins protruded from her skin. There was no mistaking it, she had some sort of disease. Based on the… interaction we’d been having for the last week or so, I wondered if it was an STD of some kind. No. I was a faithful husband, that simply wasn’t possible. I reached out and touched her legs, trying to soothe her, but she only screamed in pain as my fingers made contact. That was it, I was calling a doctor.
“Gemini Island Resort front desk speaking, how may we help you?”
“My wife is having very severe leg pain, and I think we need a doctor sent up here.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a physician here capable of treating any kind of serious issue, although we can call the mainland hospital if you would like.”
So after about an hour of sitting through Mary’s grunting and groaning, a doctor came and took a look.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” He said, not exactly awestruck, but certainly curious.
“It appears her condition is worsening rapidly, I’m very sorry, but we’re gonna need to take her to the hospital on the mainland.”
And so they did. She was loaded onto a helicopter, and they asked if I wanted to come. One part of me wanted to stay for the rest of our planned time at the resort and wait for her to recover and return, but the other part of me knew that recovery was going to take a very long time…
So I flew with them. I rented a nice beach house for myself, then took a trip to the hospital so I could see Mary again. It was there that I met the same doctor from earlier. Something was different. He still looked professional and had a look of intrigue on his face, but there was a subtle horror behind his eyes.
“Hi. I’m Marc Williams, Mary’s main Doctor for as long as she stays here.” He said, extending his hand. I shook it. Marc lead me into Mary’s room, where her legs sat exposed, hooked up to all kinds of strange equipment. The legs were just a bit larger, and the veins were just a tab bulgier. The Disease had clearly slown down to a more forging pace, but it was certainly not stopping. Marc, seeing my disappointed expression, started talking.
“We’ve been doing everything we can, and the progression of whatever this is has been drastically reduced. It’ll take weeks just to spread a little bit.”
“Wait.” I chimed in. “You don’t know what it is?”
“Nope, we haven’t been able to match it with any official ailment, and blood samples aren’t telling us anything either.”
He had a familiar look on his face. A look that I remember using a lot back in school. Strangely, it was the same indecisive look I wore when I thought I had the answer to a question, but it seemed too crazy to be true…
“John?”
“It’s me, Mary. I’m here.”
“It hurts so much.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll live.” I had uttered that same phrase when we first met. I was 17, and I was out on a hike, when I found her. She tripped on a rock in a particularly brutal fashion and broken her femur. If it hadn’t been for me, she would’ve died of thirst, unable to move, desperately crying for help. I had said those words to comfort her as I carried her along the trail, until I eventually reached my car, and drove her to the hospital.
She chuckled, and we talked, reminiscing about the good days of our past 8 years together. Yet under our cheerful conversation, there was a dark undertone. I was scared if those memories would be the last ones we would ever make together.
It got worse as time went on. Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months. Her twin sister came down, and I let her stay at the house. We never really talked much, but I knew she loved Mary just as much I did, which was enough to have my respect. So every day, we would drive down to the hospital and spend a couple hours with Mary. Each day, you could see the change in her leg size. It disturbed us, and Mary knew it. But we just tried our best to ignore it.
But the passage of time didn’t just have a profound effect on Mary, it had one on the doctors too. I never really considered what they had to go through, constantly having to treat and stabilize a completely unknown mystery illness. Each time Marc gave us another hollow piece of “good news”, his warm smile agreed with what he was saying, but his distressed eyes did not.
By the 5th month, Mary’s legs weren’t just swollen. They were MASSIVE. It was most certainly not normal, and it was getting increasingly hard to be in the room with her while ignoring it. They had become so thick in fact, that the doctors said that from this point on, it wouldn’t be possible to amputate them as a last resort. By the 6th month, there was a putrid smell emitting from the legs. It was clear that the doctors tried to mask it with all manner of sanitary products, but nothing worked.
By the 7th month, I had to stop visiting every day, and changed my visits to weekly. It felt like the smell was eroding away at my nose. Also, puss began oozing out of her legs. There was no clear source… it was just there. And by the 8th month… there was something moving. You could see the massive slabs of fat bend as something moved around inside of the legs. It seemed like each leg had one massive, bulgy, parasite squirming around inside of it. It was at that point I truly began to wonder if my sweet Mary was going to die…
During the 9th month, the true horror started. Her legs seemed like they were somehow collapsing into themselves. Perhaps… contracting? The Legs basically became half as large in about a week. But whatever those things were continued to squirm and writhe. Then, at the end of the 9th month, it all went to hell. I was sitting next to Mary. She wasn’t talking anymore. The pain had just been too much. And then she screamed. It wasn’t a normal scream, it was something entirely different.
It was as if she was playing a video game and “unlocked” a new sound. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It wasn’t even scary- it was so alien that it didn’t trigger the normal programmed stress reaction that we all have to hearing other humans suffer. As I was transfixed by this strange sound, Marc and his team burst into the room. As a nurse escorted me out, I heard Marc say:
“It seems I was correct. It’s time for the procedure.”
With that, I waited outside in the hospital waiting room, hoping for the best. After what felt like hours, the screaming stopped. The Nurse opened the door, beckoning me inside. As I entered, I was shocked. There lied Mary, on the bed. Her Heart rate was fine, but there were bandaged stumps where her legs had been. Marc was there, and he looked at me with his signature warm smile, though, like all the doctors and nurses, his eyes were basically dead.
“Shortly after you were escorted out, her legs contracted enough that we were able to apply enough pressure to instantaneously amputate them. Luckily enough, we were able to stop the bleeding in time. She’s expected to make a full recovery, and, with your budget, you should be able to get her some good prosthetics.” After he paused, I noticed that he had two bundles in his arm. Baby bundles. Was he saving my wife and delivering two different babies at the same time? Wait. No. He had never left the room. And when I looked into the warm, blue eyes of those babies, I saw mine staring back. And on them still, were the same flecks of puss that used to cover Mary’s legs. Marc noticed me staring.
“Heh, I almost forgot. Congrats on the Twins!”