Hey everyone, I ended up using the wordpress plugin "Wordfence" (free version) and it ended up doing a scan.
Once the scan was done, it compared version control diffs between the WP files and the WP files on my instance.
the index.php was all jenky.
It totally saved the day as I FTP'd the file to my computer (to review later) and uploaded a clean version.
Refreshed, now everything is good!
Great plugin! And stupid me... that's the only file I didn't check in the whole WP structure!
Thanks for your help as I bookmarked this page to get all the great info above.