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him. It was when she threatened to tell Andrea he agreed to a compromise. He could do it once a day. She made him promise he would stick to their deal.
    Only once Tyler, that’s the deal. Promise me.
    He turned onto Enterprise Crescent and made his way past blocks of empty and shuttered industrial buildings then turned left onto Dunstan Road for another block and a half to the factory property. He jumped off his bike and pushed it through the hole in the security fence stashing it in the weeds behind the factory’s long dead power transformer. His bike would not attract any attention; there was no need to lock it because it blended in with the rest of the junk strewn around the lot. The transformer had once supplied electricity to the factory, an Agro-Pharm Corporation, which had once been a large player on the local industrial scene back in the eighties.
    Now it was another abandoned piece of twentieth century technology standing sentinel to the massive structure decaying behind it. The pharmaceutical complex was two city blocks long and at least half a block wide with a dedicated spur line for rail cars. Three shifts of workers pumped out billions of doses of hormones for the dairy and meat industry during the late twentieth century.
    Until the unfortunate connection between artificial hormones and Alzheimer’s disease was discovered hundreds of employees efficiently turned out products which produced generations of out-sized livestock and over-sized humans. The physical plant was shut down in 2013, and as far as he could tell, no one had been inside the building since it had been boarded up and abandoned. He discovered it six years ago when he was ten and it became his playground.
    Cars seldom drove past and there were never any people around and, as a solitary child, the situation suited him well. He ran his fingers through the waist-high weeds growing along the rail spur which led to the factory’s concrete loading dock. He walked down the path worn through the Scots broom.
    Somehow the first year he begun hanging around the factory Andrea found out and forbade him to play there. She made up stories about how they experimented on children inside the factory but as a ten-year-old he was bright enough to realize she was making up stories to scare him, and if anything, her efforts made him more interested in the place. It was only a few blocks from their house and he came most days after school while she was at her job.
    Sections of the metal security fence around the property had collapsed and it was easy to get onto the property and once inside there was lots of interesting stuff for a kid to play with. While he was looking for materials to build a fort he looked under the long concrete loading dock and noticed the wire grill covering an air vent. He thought the grill would make a good window for his fort and it was easy to pry it off using the pry bar he found on one of his earlier adventures. It was not until the grill was off that he realized the vent provided an entryway into the building. Going inside the first time had been terrifying; it almost killed him.
    He walked to the loading dock and squatted down amongst the tall weeds and waited a few moments watching the road and the surrounding buildings. He wanted to make sure there was anyone hanging around. Satisfied, he ducked underneath and duck walked over to the vent. He removed the metal grate covering the air duct leading to the building’s basement. He knew it was unlikely anyone was watching him but he was being more careful after the incident in lab four. The meatpacking plant across the road was shut down and boarded up long ago like most of the industrial buildings in this part of the city but he was careful about not being observed.
    The vent, eighteen feet long, led to a basement utility room. He discovered the vent has a deceptively gentle downwards slope which turns vertical at the twelve foot mark. The first time inside he crawled into the vent in