It's pretty unpleasant, according to Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, authors of Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus:
If you're bitten on the face, it might reach the brain in a matter of days, but usually this journey will take weeks, months, or even upwards of a year. If you get vaccinated at any point before the virus arrives at the brain, you can clear it without any danger. But once it infects the brain, you have rabies, and it's nearly 100-percent fatal.
Alice Gregory delves into the mythology surrounding the disease:
"We love to lick, we love to suck, we love to bite," [Charles Rupprech, a representative of The Centers for Disease Control] says. Rabies, Rupprech explains, "exploits what mammals do naturally." When unpacked, the analogy between rabies symptoms and horror tropes proves to have a surprisingly logical and detailed derivation, which Wasik and Murphy spend a whole chapter meticulously reverse-engineering. The earliest vampire tales, for instance, indicate that the creatures live for forty days, which just so happens to be "the average duration of a rabies infection from time of bite until death."
The Dish 