+J.M.J.+
Waters of Death
By Miss Holly Maguire
Author's Note:
The night I saw Signs with a friend of mine, he told me to my face that I ought to write a fanfic based on it, or at least set in the same universe, and then in the next breath, he said I should be finding a more lucrative end for my writing talent! So this one's for you, Mark!
Disclaimer:
Nope, I don't own Signs which belongs to Touchstone Pictures, Blinding Edge Productions, and M. Night Shyamalan (love that name!)
Jerusalem Post, July 30, 2003
"THE WATER KILLED THE ALIENS", SAYS FARM FAMILY
K'far Sharon, Israel—"I didn't know what I was hitting when I shot that water," says Chaim Ben-Ari, the twelve-year-old son of a banana farming family living north of the Sea of Kinneret (biblical Galilee). The youth had been out early two mornings before the worldwide attack by invaders from outer space, doing target practice with a large water gun, trying to improve his aim. He had been trying to hit a glass bottle he'd set on top of a fence post near the family's plantation, when he hit something much larger and knocked it down.
"It let out a loud hissing sound, like a tire leaking only louder. I ran to see what it was. At first I thought it was a man, but it looked different, like a big lizard on its hind legs," the sturdy boy said. He described the creature as having green skin mottled like the leaves of the banana trees nearby, but that was only where the water had not hit the alien. "That part was all red and black like it had been burned. It bled black."
Chaim's father Yehoshua heard the boy's shouts and ran out of the family's barn where he was fixing a harvester, finding his son standing over the body of a dead alien. "I feared the worst when I heard him shout, but he explained what had happened," the forty-year old farmer explained. "There had been talk that these strange airships had come from another world. Others said it was all foolish talk, but I saw this creature with my own eyes."
Ben-Ari soon devised a solution to keep his family safe in the even of an attack. He and his sons built a large raft, loaded the family and its prized possessions onto the raft, tied the family livestock to the edges of the raft and set it adrift in an irrigation canal. Some of their neighbors considered it a foolhardy idea, but these same people would later not survive the attack.
Ben-Ari's brother Shmuel, a field strategist for the IDF, soon heard of Yehoshua's discovery. He presented the information to the leaders of the IDF, including Chief of Staff Ariel Ben-Ra'am, who found the idea "nonsensical", until he saw Shmuel Ben-Ari's photographs of the dead alien and heard Chaim's account of what had taken place. "It seemed utterly ridiculous, too simple for it to be plausible, but at that point, anything that could have worked was not out of the question," Ben-Ra'am admits.
Using this information, Ben-Ra'am equipped members of the IDF patrolling the streets of Jerusalem with insecticide sprayers filled with plain water.
Just after sundown, when the alien aircraft began sending down scouts, the IDF opened fire using the water sprayers, killing hundreds of the aliens.
What seemed like an implausible, "nonsensical" idea was soon adopted by other nations as the alien attacks grew more widespread. The Palestinians of the West Bank and other regions failed to adopt these measures, choosing to rely on traditional weapons, which proved utterly futile. No data is currently available on the Palestinian casualties, but the numbers are expected to total in the thousands.
"'And a little child shall lead them', was said about the peaceable kingdom in the book of the prophet Isaiah", Ben-Ari said. "But a little child has truly led us in a war to protect a kingdom that may someday, please G-d, be peaceable."
