Graveyard Shindig by The Creepniks

After giving his testimony to the first police officers on the scene, he fell into a series of convulsions and died shortly thereafter in the ICU ward of TVMC. An autopsy, performed later at the request of the deceased's wife, Margaret Alkerd (also of Slocum), found that he had been suffering through the final stages of dementia, in addition to a hitherto unknown variant of rabies. The police continued their investigation of the missing cadavers for a few weeks, but by then, the trail had run cold.

The unidentified bodies were all but forgotten in the year following the body-snatching fiasco; that is, until police began finding more corpses, also marked with the strange runic symbol. Nothing of this scope had ever been witnessed in the small towns surrounding Elkhart. The townsfolk prayed for an end to this plague, but more and more corpses were found, all in various stages of decay. Forensic specialists were called in to assist with the identification of the bodies, but their efforts were fruitless, more so by the fact that none of the locals were actually reported missing. The local funeral parlors worked long hours to get the ever-growing roster of the recently dead planted quickly in the earth.

And then it all stopped.

Life returned to semi-normality for some years. Children filed back into the schools, parents returned to their jobs, and farmers planted crops (though strictly avoiding the portions of fields where corpses were unearthed). The stories of the strange corpses took on the aspects of a local legend and were all but forgotten. Even school functions such as dances started to recur with some regularity. It was at one of these dances that the delicate veneer of normality exploded with a force unequalled in the annals of Texas history or legend.

All the local students were in attendance at the Fall Festival dance in the gymnasium at Elkhart Jr-Sr High. A local band, The Rockin' Daddy-O's, was belting out the hits of the day. The students were hopping, bopping, and having a gay old time when a scream pierced the air. A young girl at the front of the audience was admiring the dashing good looks of the Daddy-O's frontman, Jake Henson, when she noticed something was terribly wrong.

The heat of the house lights had begun to affect Jake's face; it was blistering and peeling at the edges. As this rotten façade sloughed off, the dancers bore witness to something that had lain dormant for years; the thing that had been found in that desolate pasture all those years ago. The decayed cadaver continued to lurch and sing, spewing graveworms all over the mike and the audience as the flayed features of the once-handsome singer settled into a putrid pile at his feet. Upon seeing the grim visage and hearing the unholy shouts of Hellfire, the attendees at the dance started to panic, running each other over as they fled for the doors. The rest of the band followed the decaying frontman's lead, shedding the hollowed bodies of the band members that they had so mercilessly gutted an hour before. That all-too-familiar rune was visible on their slime-covered faces, leering like skeletons through a tissue-thin layer of gelatinous skin and grave wax. The walls trembled with the throbbing pestilence of their riotous cacophony.

The youngsters in the audience were running, screaming, vomiting, fainting... all trying to escape the evil that befell them. But just as they reached the gymnasium doors, they came crashing in under the weight of the reanimated corpses who had silently surrounded the gym. Legions of these fly-blown corpses shuffled in through the doors, each bearing the mark on their foreheads. The students nearest them were overcome by the utter stench of death and degradation that engulfed them. The undead army tore through the students, pulling entrails from young bellies, tearing out eyes with exposed fingerbones. An unearthly chorus of moans, like the choir of Hell, filled the gymnasium to the rafters. Some students simply stood there in a pool of their own urine, hands to their ears, chanting mantras of disbelief. The carnage was total. The hardwood floors were covered in the flesh and blood-matted hair of the dancers. The whole scene looked like some blasphemous collage of anatomy books; a respiratory system here, a jellied brain there, the whole building bathed in the sheared-copper smell of teenage blood.

And onstage, the band played on.

In the decades following that brutal night, the town of Elkhart was quarantined off from the rest of the world. There was too much danger that the evil would spread. Sources say that you can still hear that hellish band playing in the now-decrepit gymnasium, now resembling more than anything the maw of Hell.

And the band plays on forever there, until the end of times when the Abyss will be thrown wide open to welcome them back home. Until then, the rest of the world can only pray that their evil is contained; that the naïve ears of the populace should never hear their damning racket or heed their luciferian beckon. That infernal tool of Satan, the Creepniks!

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